Iffix testamerrto viri reverendi 
ABNER JACKSON, S. T. D., LL. D., 

Iruj-uisoe Collegii per annos septem 



Il6?_ 



PRAESIDIS. 
MDCCCLXXIV. 



j LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. J 

1 Shelf ..^Q-J-- 



jQ UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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LECTURES 



PANTHEISTIC IDEA 



AN IMPERSONAL - SUBSTANCE - DEITY, 

AS CONTRASTED WITH 

THE CHRISTIAN FAITH CONCERNING 
ALMIGHTY GOD. 

BY THE 

REV. MORGAN DIX, S. T. D. 

RECTOR OP TRINITY CHURCH, NEW YORK. 



NEW YORK: 

PUBLISHED BY HURD AND HOUGHTON, 

BOSTON: E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY. 

1864. 



^fs 



o 



Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by 

Hurd and Houghton, 

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District of New York. 



RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE! 

8TEREOTTPED AND PRINTED BY 

H. 0. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. 






ADVERTISEMENT. 



The following Lectures were prepared in the early- 
part of last year, and were delivered at St. Paul's 
Chapel during the Lenten season of 1863. They 
were preached, for the second time, in Trinity 
Chapel, during the past winter, at the request of a 
large number of the members of our parish. After 
that, the Vestry of Trinity Church expressed, by a 
resolution to that effect, the wish that they should 
be published. This desire could not be acceded to 
without embarrassment ; for the lectures were writ- 
ten without reference to publication, and the author, 
while aware of the character and extent of their im- 
perfections, knew also that he had no time to make 
them what he would have them, and that they must 
<*o forth as they were, or not at all. But the hope 
that they might do good outweighed the fear of 
criticism, while the author felt that the known dif- 
ficulties of his position would establish his claim to 
favorable indulgence. It is our misfortune, in this 
country, that we have no body of clergy sequestered 
for careful and holy studies in defence of the faith ; 



IV 



AD VERT1SEMENT. 



no cloistered band whose only work it should be to 
read and write and pray, and thereby sustain the 
active laborers in the open field. Till this defect be 
mended, the outdoor workers must be also the 
writers, notwithstanding all the disadvantages of 
their situation. But while it is so, they should be 
treated with allowance, and judged not so much in 
respect to the manner in which they accomplish 
their tasks, as with reference to the object and end 
proposed. The priests of the Church, in the full ex- 
ercise of their functions, can hardly be expected to 
have time to write at all ; much less can it be 
thought that they should be able to write with care- 
ful and polished style, and with the finish and re- 
finement which come of leisure for practice and dis- 
cipline. But reputation is the last object which we 
may propose to ourselves who have upon us, day 
by day, the care of the souls of sinners : only to the 
good of those souls may we look, and to the glory 
of Almighty God. Enough if the former of these 
ends be secured, and the latter in any degree pro- 
moted ; the writer will cheerfully bear the reproach 
of those who may read, not to grow better and 
wiser, but to find occasions against the theme in 
the shortcomings of him who handles it. What has 
been written and preached, and is now given to the 
public, was so prepared and spoken solely with the 
view of stating the truth concerning the Almighty. 
May He accept the work done unto His honor; and 



ADVERTISEMENT. V 

may He forgive the weakness of His servant, and 
bring, as He ever does, spiritual strength out of 
mortal infirmity. Unto Him be glory everlastingly. 
Amen. 

Trinity Rectory, New York, May 23, 1864. 



CONTENTS. 



— ♦_ 

PAGE 

INTRODUCTION ix 

LECTURE I. 
THE CHURCH AND PHILOSOPHY 1 

LECTURE II. 
PANTHEISM IN ITS THEORETIC FORM 15 

LECTURE UI. 
PANTHEISM IN ITS APPLICATIONS 32 

LECTURE IY. 
OBJECTIONS TO THE PANTHEISTIC THEORY 49 

LECTURE V. 
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF ALMIGHTY GOD 65 

LECTURE VI. 
THE CHRISTIAN FAITH IN ITS APPLICATIONS . . . , 80 

NOTES 97 



INTRODUCTION. 



Although it is considered that the design of 
the following Lectures could hardly be misunder- 
stood by one who should read them without preju- 
dice, yet it seems proper to meet one objection 
which may be thought by some to lie against them. 
The writer would, therefore, in advance disclaim 
the intention of fixing upon every one whose the- 
ories on history, on ethics, and on the course and 
movement of terrestrial things, are in the following 
pages more particularly referred to, the stigma and 
reproach of consciously holding the philosophical 
system with which those theories are undoubtedly 
allied. For it is a well-known feature of the pan- 
theistic heresy, and characteristic of that profound 
spiritual disease, that the very individuals whose 
views most nearly harmonize with it may yet be 
strenuous in disclaiming the relationship, although 
it be evident that their position is a complete incon- 
sequence, except as interpreted on the hypothesis 
of such a tie. We are willing, then, to admit and 
to give prominence to the fact of their protests and 
denials, thinking it sufficient to prove the identity 



X INTRODUCTION. 

of the results reached in either case. If the popu- 
lar and plausible rationalism of the day is found to 
involve the same consequences which follow from 
the principles of simple Pantheism, that should be 
enough to secure for it the mistrust and aversion 
of thoughtful men ; the question of the degree of 
consanguinity may be held as not essential. 

The object proposed in these lectures is as fol- 
lows : — To show, after stating scientifically the 
vast and disastrous heresy of the ages, that mod- 
ern lines of thought, professed modern discoveries, 
and modern theories of human progress, of history, 
of ethics, and of religion, are but new developments 
of the spirit which invented that fatal system ; that 
they run in parallel lines with it ; that they lead to 
the same conclusions. The author entertains no 
doubt of the fact of this correspondence. It is not 
necessary to prove identity of origin: it is enough j 
to show that the principle which underlies the^j 
whole system of modern speculation involves the! 
results which were reached by the ancient philoso- 1 
phies, and that the movement is toward the very 
same position of a final and universal skepticism. 
After that, it matters little whether the writers of 
our day consent or decline to be classed as follow- 
ers of the old pagan masters. They labor toward 
the same ends, and are walking in the same direc- 
tion. 

The grand idea of the age in which we live is 



INTRODUCTION. XI 

progress. That word is rung in our ears inces- 
santly, from pulpit and platform, with the pertina- 
cious tintinnabulation of a jangling chime. It is 
a progress without God, and apart from the insti- 
tutions of Christianity ; a progress aside from rev- 
elation and in independence of spiritual authority ; 
the progress of humanity, confident in itself and in 
its own powers. The Church also announces a 
progress to mankind; but not a progress such as 
that of which the world is dreaming, and in the 
fancied accomplishment of which society seems 
fairly drunk. A progress is implied in the very 
idea of redemption ; the prophets, the evangelists, 
the apostles, have spoken and written thereof, in 
language of unmatched sublimity ; and God Him- 
self, incarnate, has illustrated its nature and ini- 
tiated it in His own person. Let us not forget 
that progress is the symbol of Christianity ; but 
let us also remember of what sort that progress 
is : that Christ, becoming man, did grow in wis- 
dom and in stature, and in the showing forth of 
love and sacrifice, until, having been made per- 
fect therein, He was lifted up, and glorified, and 
set on the right hand of the Majesty on high ; and 
that, in Christ, man is also to be in like manner 
elevated and exalted, yet only through grace and 
by the favor of God, — not for his own merits, 
nor in his own strength; and that he is also to 
grow to the measure of the stature of the fulness 



xii INTRODUCTION. 

of Christ, and to find at length his home in 
heaven, and his sphere of action in eternity. This 
idea of progress, — through grace by faith, and in 
the path of sacrifice and love, — is the grand 
idea of Christianity. But it is not that progress 
which is spoken of in the world and in the phil- 
osophic and rationalistic schools. Their's is a god- 
less progress, a merely human progress, an illu- 
sion and a dream ; the speech is as sounding brass 
and a tinkling cymbal, and the end is disappoint- 
ment and disgrace. It is so, because men do not 
include in their idea of progress the truth con- 
cerning the personal and living God, revealed to 
us in the gospel and through the Church of Jesus 
Christ. When that faith is lost to man, his prog- 
ress is that of one who rushes headlong in the 
dark, and sees not the gulf toward which he is 
hastening. 

The rationalistic schemes in vogue in our own 
day would seem to rest, as upon a basis, on three 
principles, two of which are positive and the third 
negative. The two positive principles are, the 
unity and identity of substance, and the mutable 
and variable character of truth. The negative 
principle is, the denial of the existence of any rev- 
elation aside from that which is supposed to be 
made to each individual through his own mind and 
spirit. The presence of these principles may clearly 
be detected, not merely in the writings of the phi- 



INTRODUCTION. xiii 

losophizers of the day, but also in the tendencies 
of our popular religionists, who have practically 
annulled the authority of the Word of God, by ad- 
mitting in its extremest rigor the fatal right of 
private judgment as to the meaning of the Scrip- 
tures, and who have no more idea of a divinely 
established church than a barbarian has of a consti- 
tutional government. It is against that threefold 
basis of rationalism that we are now called to put 
forth all the strength we possess ; and there is no 
work of more sacred obligation for us, at this hour, 
than to declare the opposite principles of the infi- 
nite and radical distinction between God and the 
universe; of the immutable and unvarying nature 
of truth, as contradistinguished from human opin- 
ions ; and of the binding force and sole sufficiency 
of the revelation once for all made to the world by 
Jesus Christ, and perpetuated in the visible Church. 
Other themes possess but slight importance as com- 
pared with these ; about them lie the issues of life 
death. 

With one remark, in addition, these introductory 
observations shall be terminated. Much has been 
said in the following Lectures concerning the origin 
of the world, the course of human events, and the 
progress of our race. The views entertained upon 
the latter two of these subjects will vary according 
to the idea held respecting the foremost of the 
three. Let it then be observed that there is a 



XIV 



INTRODUCTION. 



crucial test of all theories of the origin of the uni- 
verse. It is the Catholic dogma of the creation : 
" In principio Deus creavit caelum et terrain" It 
is impossible to misconstrue those words ; it is 
equally impossible to evade them. A man must 
accept them or refuse them. If he hold them 
frankly and honestly, he cannot be a pantheist. 
If, on the other hand, he stagger at them, and 
hesitate about receiving them, he is not to be de- 
pended upon. And if any one deny them outright, 
we maintain that there is for him no possible choice 
save between the schemes of Dualism and Panthe- 
ism. The dogma of the creation, as opposed to the 
hypothesis of emanation or that of development, — 
a dogma sublime above all others, as well as first 
of all in order, — is declared to us in the Scriptures 
and secured to us in the Creed, to the end that we 
may be forever settled and established in the 
truth ; that the dark problem, against which the un- 
enlightened mind has ever dashed itself in fruitless 
striving, may be cleared up ; that we may have a 
rational and satisfying cosmogony; and that the 
whole of life may be rendered real and practical 
and comprehensible to man. When that dogma is 
denied, all is in effect denied. When the belief in 
a God who created the world has been lost, all is 
lost that is stable or permanent in human thought. 
If the theories to which reference is hereinafter 
made can be reconciled with the first article of the 



INTRODUCTION. XV 

Christian faith, we are ready to withdraw our ob- 
jections to those schemes. But if, on the contrary, 
it be found impossible to harmonize them with that 
article, we charge them with being radically anti- 
christian ; and we shall classify them with the great 
traditional heresy of the ages, until cause be shown 
why they should not be assigned to that stock, and 
until it be proved that, as to leading ideas and prac- 
tical results, they are not substantially one and the 
same with it. 



LECTURES. 



LECTURE I. 

THE CHUKCH AOT) PHILOSOPHY. 

The seasons of Advent and Lent have been from 
very ancient time regarded in the Church of Christ 
as especially suitable for the work of instructing the 
people in the higher mysteries of the Faith. There 
are at those times strong, though silent, influences 
about us which affect the heart with unusual force, 
and dispose to a more thoughtful attention to the 
word of life ; and the power of the Spirit is upon us 
then in fuller measure and with more evident effect. 
Accordingly it is purposed, by God's permission, to 
devote a part of this season of Lent to studies of 
the class referred to, by means of a course of lec- 
tures, in which the subject shall be the Existence 
of Almighty God. 

They who watch and comprehend the current of 
modern thought, will not feel surprised at my choice 
of a theme. For the great question of our day is 
about the Personality of the Deity, with all that the 
term implies. It is not in dispute whether there 



2 THE CHURCH AND PHILOSOPHY. 

be, or be not, a God ; but whether the God, whose 
existence is in terms admitted, be, or be not, a Per- 
sonal God. Upon this point the controversy is 
joined. On the one hand, we find a series of prop- 
ositions, clear and intelligible, concerning the Al- 
mighty Being, in which are included affirmations 
touching His eternity, His providence, His acts in the 
past, His purposes in the future, and His relations to 
the universe and to mankind. This body of doctrine 
is formulated in the Creed of the Catholic Church. 
On the other hand, there may be noticed a class of 
expressions, variable, misty, vague, and unintelligi- 
ble, concerning a somewhat which is, for convenience' 
sake, styled God. These constitute a kind of tissue 
in which are packed the religious thoughts of the 
free-thinkers and rationalizers of the period. It is 
proposed in the following lectures to contrast these 
two ideas of the Deity, so far as the looseness of the 
latter will permit : — to compare the dogma and the 
speculation, the substance and the shadow, the truth 
and the fable, the reality and the dream. 

In position, in importance, and in necessity, this 
subject stands second to none. 

In position ; because the question about the exist- 
ence of Almighty God precedes all others that can 
be raised whether in religion or in philosophy. 

In importance ; because He hath none that may 
be compared with Him, and we, without Him, are 
less than nothing. 



THE CHURCH AND PHILOSOPHY. 3 

In necessity ; because of the rashness, the levity, 
the ignorance with which His being, His attributes, 
and His works are treated of or referred to by the 
writers and talkers of our day. 

The task in hand is, therefore, approached with 
serious convictions of duty, as respects the honor of 
the Almighty and the safety of the souls of men. 
If He be what He is represented to be in the Creed, 
then is the rationalistic conception of Him an out- 
rage on His majesty and a libel on His name. If, 
on the other hand, the Rationalists are correct, then 
are we Christians the victims of a delusion, and our 
hope in Him, our love for Him, our fear of Him, are 
but phases of childish superstition. 

Let me open this great theme, by drawing a 
clear and sharp distinction. It is the distinction 
between the Church and Philosophy. All who 
think and believe as the Church instructs us, have a 
faith ; while they who think and speculate indepen- 
dently of her definitions, can rise no higher than 
the level of a probable opinion. A faith is the gift 
of God to us in the Church ; while the suggestion 
of an opinion is the highest attainment of Philos- 
ophy. 

The Church has her Creed. It is un variable and 
fixed. It has come to us from the earliest days. 
That Creed, so far as it relates to the Most High 
and undivided Trinity, is held (and we rejoice to 
remember this) by multitudes who are not exter- 



4 THE CHURCH AND PHILOSOPHY. 

nally in union with us. When, therefore, I speak 
of the faith, I mean the belief in God which is ex- 
pressed in that Creed ; and all who think of Him as 
He is therein described, we place together as holding, 
so far forth, the Church view, the Christian idea. 

Upon the other side we set all those persons who 
hold opinions at variance with the articles of the 
Creed, and we comprehend their views under the 
general name of philosophy. We do this, remem- 
bering that the themes of philosophy, in the highest 
sense of the word, are the same as those of theology ; 
that the chief studies of the ancient philosophers 
were about God, man, the soul, our duties, and our 
destinies; and that it is possible to speculate on these 
subjects independently of revelation. Opinions about 
Almighty God, when formed and held without ref- 
erence to the Creed of the Church, may be termed, 
without harshness, philosophical opinions ; and their 
maintainers we regard, not as believers, but as phi- 
losophers. There were schools of philosophy in the 
time of our Lord and his apostles ; St. Paul refers 
to them and warns the faithful against them. There 
are schools of philosophy now, in our own day, and 
in our own land, and in our very midst ; and we, 
who stand upon the apostolic platform, must bear 
our witness against them. The modern schools have 
as little authority as the ancient; whatever they may 
call themselves, we owe them no more deference or 
respect. 



THE CHURCH AND PHILOSOPHY. 5 

We class, therefore, under the head of philosophic 
speculation all those views which differ from the 
standards of the Church ; and we say, that if a man 
believes the Creed, he has a faith, and that if he 
denies it he has a philosophy. And so, in the phil- 
osophic schools of the period, we shall find ideas 
very different from those entertained and taught in 
the Church. We shall find the particular views of 
men, stated with grace of diction, presented with 
plausibility, defended by weighty arguments, asserted 
with zeal, full often recommended by the pure and 
moral lives of their maintainers. But yet we shall 
feel that these men are offering us a philosophy and 
not a faith ; and that if we were to exchange what 
we have received for what they would give we 
should be bartering confidence for hesitation, assur- 
ance for doubt, and humble trust in Another for 
reliance in self. 

To these philosophic schools must we go, however, 
in order to learn what are the opinions of men con- 
cerning Almighty God. Nor shall we reck, though 
among these schools there be some whose members 
style them Christian churches, and propose their 
own speculative theories for consideration as Chris- 
tian doctrine. On the contrary, we shall regard such 
claims as but additional instances of groundless 
opinions on the part of their maintainers. To hear 
such claims need cause us no surprise, for it seems 
the most natural thing in the world that they should 



THE CHURCH AND PHILOSOPHY. 



be made. If men entertain erroneous views of God, 
of Christ, of sin, of redemption, it would seem to 
follow of necessity that their views respecting them- 
selves should also be incorrect. Since the philo- 
sophic schools, exhibiting no stability, vary inces- 
santly in their opinions about Almighty God, we 
cannot count as better than an opinion the special 
views which they may hold concerning their own 
corporate character. We shall, therefore, go to 
them, whatever they may style themselves, as we 
would go to schools of opinion, which in fact they 
are ; and from them we shall learn how the human 
mind thinks of God, when that mind has shaken 
itself free from the restraints of law and has re- 
jected the traditions of the past. We shall then 
compare these results with the articles of faith as 
taught, the same everywhere and always, in the 
Church; and thus we shall obtain the double advan- 
tage, first, of a clearer view of the truth, and sec- 
ondly, of a more loving appreciation of its worth 
and power. 

But a difficulty may suggest itself to the mind 
of some one here present ; a question may arise 
upon the design which has been announced. To 
some it may appear as though the subject chosen 
for these lectures were too simple a one to admit 
of protracted discussion. It might be said, all 
men, or almost all, believe in God. All admit 
His existence ; all do Him reverence, and confess 



THE CHURCH AND PHILOSOPHY. J 

their obligation to obey Him. Why then select a 
theme about which there is practically so little vari- 
ance among men \ Why not rather choose some 
subject distinctly characteristic of the system of the 
Church? 

Alas, my hearers, these are but assumptions. 
To name the name of God is not enough ; to say 
that a man believes in Him is not enough ; to admit 
His existence is not sufficient. The name which 
you give Him must be His own name, and not the 
name of another. The faith in Him must not be an 
erroneous faith, but a true one. The confession of 
His existence must accord with the sublime facts of 
His eternal nature and being. There be gods many 
and lords many in these days, but unto us there is 
only the one God, the very and the true. The 
doctrine of Almighty God is indeed the first of all ; 
but there, at the threshold and at its mere an- 
nouncement, men stumble and fall. Count not too 
surely on the correctness of any one's conceptions 
of Him until you know how those conceptions have 
been formed ; whether the mind has humbled itself 
before His word, or whether the will has marked 
out for itself a path, and struck away therein. 
There is not perhaps a greater want at this hour, a 
deeper want, a more urgent want, among our peo- 
ple, than that of a true and right knowledge of 
God. Even from the first has man erred therein. 
Our first parents doubted of Him ; they mistook His 



8 THE CHURCH AND PHILOSOPHY. 

character, and in that error they disbelieved His 
word. And this they did, although He was with 
them as a father and a friend, although He com- 
muned with them face to face, and called them by 
their names. It is a strange and a most instructive 
picture. With them, day by day ; accustomed to 
walk with them among the trees of the garden; 
wont to reason with them and to teach them, as a 
parent deals with the child : not even then did the 
Lord God succeed in impressing on their minds 
and hearts a correct idea of Himself. They mis- 
took Him altogether. They thought, " He will not 
keep His word ; and, though He promise, yet He 
will not perform." And so, they considered, that 
they might with impunity taste the forbidden fruit, 
although He had declared in their ears, " in the 
day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die." 
If then, in Eden, and ere yet they had fallen from 
original righteousness, our first parents had and 
acted on a false impression of God, notwithstand- 
ing the advantage of a habitual, a most intimate 
intercourse and communion with Him ; — let us not 
marvel that aberrations should be found to-day, 
and every day, and everywhere on this subject; 
aberrations in the course of human thought, as 
men plod wearily through the world. Error there 
is, on this first point, on this fundamental truth ; 
error, wide-spread and profound. It shall be shown 
to you; it shall be set before you, in its deepest 



THE CHURCH AND PHILOSOPHY. 9 

shades of gloom ; and you shall see what horrible 
heresies have arisen to hide from our eyes the Lord 
God Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. 
You shall hear of schemes of doctrine in which the 
true idea of Him has vanished, although His name 
be, for decency's sake, retained. And then the 
ramifications of error shall be traced ; its influence 
pointed out; its tracks and footprints noted in 
places where they were unsuspected ; until you 
feel that for want of knowledge of this first article 
of the Creed, multitudes are in actual and extreme 
peril ; and until you thank the good Lord for pre- 
serving us from the calamity of losing the truth, as 
many in our midst have lost it forever. 

To proceed. The observations already made 
have been but preliminary. It was intended to in- 
troduce by them the subject to which your close 
attention is to be called. And in order to show in 
what course we are to journey together, I would 
next remark, that there exists, and has existed from 
very ancient days, a certain infidel theory which, 
though not widely taught at the present time in its 
scientific form, underlies most of the popular errors 
of the day. It concerns the nature and manner of 
existence of Almighty God, and it may be regarded 
as the just expression of the cast of modern philo- 
sophic thought on those mysteries. I refer to the 
system commonly known as Pantheism. That 
system will form the subject of our studies ; and 



10 THE CHURCH AND PHILOSOPHY. 

you are now invited to a comparative view of the 
philosophic theory known as Pantheism, and of the 
Christian faith as contained in the Creeds of the 
Catholic Church. The discussion will be arranged 
as follows : — 

In the next lecture, it is proposed to state the 
system of Pantheism in its crude, its abstract, its 
theoretic form. 

In the third lecture of the course, I shall endeavor 
to show under what shapes, and in what quarters 
we meet with that system in its practical operation ; 
for in its theoretic form, it is, as yet, hardly known 
or admitted amongst us. 

In the fourth lecture, the consequences and results 
of the theory will be pointed out ; since in these we 
find our strongest arguments against it. 

The fifth lecture will be devoted to the presenta- 
tion of the Christian ideas of Almighty God, as 
gathered from that revelation of Himself which He 
has made to us through His eternal Son. 

And, in the sixth, and closing lecture, we shall 
contrast the life of one who holds the pantheistic 
scheme with that of the believer, and exhibit the 
probable working of the two systems in the way of 
this mortal existence and at the hour of death. 

And now may the Holy Spirit, whose aid and 
blessing we invoke, guide the preacher and the 
hearer into the fuller knowledge and deeper love of 
the truth. 



THE CHURCH AND PHILOSOPHY. H 

In bringing these introductory observations to a 
conclusion, two suggestions will be made on points 
connected with our general subject. 

The first is this : that while the word Pantheism 
is very frequently used, the system known by that 
name is but imperfectly understood. And hence it 
has come to pass that careless, ignorant, or inter- 
ested speakers allow themselves the widest latitude 
in its employment ; while the ordinary hearer gath- 
ers from it only a vague and uncertain impression 
of evil because he knows not precisely what it 
means. It is convenient for the unlearned to have 
within reach some high-sounding term, with which 
to lay about him, in emergencies, to the surprise 
and alarm of the vulgar. In this manner, the 
term " Pantheism" has been employed. When 
the partisan does not know precisely what to say 
against some dogma or some view which he re- 
gards as erroneous or unsound, he cries out, as a 
last resort, that it is pantheistic, trusting with that 
wordy blast to make an end. But such a charge, 
although it may at first alarm, through its power 
of suggesting a freight of unknown horrors, soon 
ceases to terrify, especially if too frequently repeat- 
ed ; for the people, attaching no very precise idea 
to the word, are not likely to feel the proper degree 
of abhorrence for things pantheistic, because they 
do not know what Pantheism is. Full often has 
the preacher heard this term employed in a loose, 



12 THE CHURCH AND PHILOSOPHY. 

impracticable way, and in cases where there was no 
ground at all for the charge. For this reason, the 
attempt will be made to give a clear definition of 
the word and an intelligible account of the system. 
If that attempt should prove successful, the result 
will follow, that, while you recoil from that dark, 
that gloomy, that hopeless theory with the deepest 
horror, you will at the same time have formed too 
clear an idea of it to be in danger of tracing it or 
thinking that you see it where it is not. The 
remark has been made of a certain great commen- 
tator on the Holy Scriptures, deceased some two 
centuries ago, that he was crazed on the subject of 
an early sect of heretics known as the Gnostics, so 
that there was hardly a chapter in St. Paul's Epis- 
tles, in which he did not think he saw allusion to 
gnostic opinions or gnostic error. Thus has it been 
in a measure with Pantheism. Men cry out that it 
is here, that it is there, whenever they meet with a 
difficulty which they are too ignorant or too lazy 
to grapple with and master, or whenever they would 
refute a doctrine unpalatable to their taste. Thus, 
when we speak of Christ as having the common hu- 
manity of all our race, some cry " Pantheism! " Or, 
when we refer to all the faithful as truly and really in 
Christ, and He in them, there are well-meaning folks 
who utter the same exclamation, because they think 
that they ought to make some protest, and yet can 
imagine nothing else to say. But, brethren, all error 









THE CHURCH AND PHILOSQPHY. 13 

is not pantheistic. And our attempt to explain the 
system will involve an indirect defence of certain 
doctrines of the Church ; since when you come to 
know what it really is, you will perceive how idle are 
some of those charges which are brought by sciolists 
against the mysteries of redemption. 

The second and final suggestion for your thoughts, 
dear brethren in Christ, is this : that studies such as 
those now proposed may help to prepare us, under 
the blessing of God, and under the guidance of the 
Holy Ghost, for meeting the last danger which comes 
on the inhabitants of the earth, as the end of the 
world approaches. We are told, that, before the 
Lord's return to judgment, antichrist shall come. 
Who is antichrist] and what? The answer to 
these questions our studies in philosophy may help 
to furnish. Be not misled. Antichrist, it seems, 
is more likely to appear in the habit of a specula- 
tive philosopher than in the vestments of a pope. 
The real antichrist, I think, will be the reason 
of man; that reason in its final attitude, when, 
having first refused the guidance of revelation, 
having despised the Church and thrown away the 
scriptures, having theorized for itself, having sought 
out many inventions in the field of thought, having 
announced its own conclusions as the sum of all 
wisdom and knowledge, it stands, at length, erect 
and defiant, proclaiming its self-sufficiency and de- 
claring its independence of any God above, of any 



14 



THE CHURCH AND PHILOSOPHY. 



law, tradition, order, faith below. Do not look for 
antichrist in any of the temples of the Lord; nor 
among men, who, however grievously they may have 
erred, do still in substance hold the faith. He com- 
eth not that way. But look for him in the schools 
of an ungodly speculation ; in the labyrinths of in- 
dependent thought; in the pulpits where is preached 
the self-glorification of man. That is the road 
whereby he comes. And when, according to proph- 
ecy, the night sets in, that night of falsehood and 
error with which he shall obscure the knowledge 
of God, the Lord shall save us, if we cling to the 
faith once delivered to the saints, utterly refusing 
to have any other creed than that of ancient time. 
And so shall we be in peace ; and we, the Israel of 
God, shall have light in our dwellings ; while be- 
yond there shall not be an house where there is not 
one dead. 



PANTHEISM IN ITS THEORETIC FORM. \5 



LECTURE II. 

PANTHEISM IN ITS THEORETIC FORM. 

In the opening lecture of this course, its general 
subject was announced to be, a comparison between 
the speculative theory known as Pantheism, and the 
Christian faith as contained in the Creed. It is now 
proposed to present, in its scientific form, the theory- 
referred to, and to show what is the pantheistic con- 
ception of God. The word has an ill-starred sound; 
to place it in conjunction with the symbol of the 
Catholic faith is to set death and life in contrast. 
But perhaps the term would be less appalling if bet- 
ter understood. Regarded at a distance, the spectre 
looms before us with formidable mien ; but it might 
yield to a vigorous blow, or even melt in the ray of 
a light held full in front. To those who are be- 
witched by Pantheism it is, indeed, as fatal an adver- 
sary as a man could encounter on his pathway. But 
there is actually no reason why any one should be 
led off by it. For it is marked by that weakness 
which belongs to the illogical and the absurd. It 
is repulsive, it is cold. It has grandeur, but that 
grandeur is the grandeur of obscurity. Its lan- 
guage is impressive, but this results from a profit- 



16 PANTHEISM IN ITS THEORETIC FORM. 

less mysticism. This evening we will consider the 
theory in its simple and abstract form. Afterwards, 
its application will be pointed out, and its falseness 
exposed. In all this, may that blessed Spirit be our 
guide whose aid we still invoke ! 

A distinction has already been drawn between the 
Church and the School of Philosophy. The Church 
is that divinely appointed institution in and by which 
the simple and unalterable revelation of God is pre- 
served in the world and everywhere presented to man- 
kind. The Philosophic School, on the other hand, 
is an invention of human origin, where changeful 
and complex opinions are ventilated and discussed. 
Now, the first question in philosophy is that which 
touches the existence of God, and the second con- 
cerns His nature. And since the Church and the 
School differ mainly in this, that the latter perpetu- 
ally asks questions while the former constantly in- 
structs, the first article of the Christian faith is 
that which declares the existence of the Almighty, 
and the next is that which tells us, who and what He 
is, and what He has done. 

Philosophy, however, (and by this I mean the hu- 
man reason speculating freely without reference to 
revelation,) admits at the outset that there is a God. 
To do this is doubtless unavoidable ; for atheism is 
moral, intellectual, and spiritual death, and genuine 
atheists are, and always have been, and always must 
be, very few and very far between. Philosophy, 






PANTHEISM IN ITS THEORETIC FORM. 17 

therefore, repels with virtuous indignation the charge 
of denying the existence of a Deity. It has ever been 
so. The ancient schools and the modern were alike 
in this point. The epicureans and the stoics whom 
St. Paul encountered on Mars' Hill, acknowledged, 
after their own fashion, the gods. The rationalists 
of to-day, be they German, French, English, or 
American, admit the term and employ the sacred 
name; and among the leading heresiarchs might be 
mentioned some who have expended much power in 
framing ingenious demonstrations of a religious 
character to show that there is a Supreme Being, 
and to clear up the mystery of His nature. 

It is not, therefore, on the question whether there 
be a God that the Church and the Philosophers join 
issue. So far they agree. But when they go on to 
speak of His nature they differ. When it is asked, 
" What is God? " the systems part, never to meet 
again. 

The ground of this divergence is the total an- 
tagonism in views respecting the personality of the 
Deity. Does God exist as an impersonal substance, 
like air, or water ? or has He a true personality, like 
men % This question is met by opposite replies. 

The Church declares a personality in the Deity; a 
personality in the highest and fullest sense of the 
word. She teaches her children to believe, that as 
each one of them has a true, distinct, practical per- 
sonality, so likewise is it with the God who made 



18 



PANTHEISM IN ITS THEORETIC FORM. 



them all. Nay; she does not merely say that what 
is true of them is true of Him ; she implies that it 
is true of Him in a higher sense, in a completed 
sense. So that, whatever may be the elements of 
proper personality, they exist in us but imperfectly, 
in Him with absolute fulness. This is the Catholic 
faith. Philosophy, on the other hand, opines that 
God has no personality ; that He is an absolute, om- 
nipresent, and impersonal substance ; as it were, an 
atmosphere in which everything lives ; a heat diffused 
in which everything is kept warm ; an element in 
which everything swims. In that sense philosophy 
considers that there is a God, and admits that God 
to be eternal. 

The personality of Almighty God is either in 
terms or by implication, incessantly denied, even by 
those who admit their belief in His existence. This 
is a phenomenon so strange as to invite to investi- 
gation. To us Christians there seems to be a con- 
tradiction here, and, although the persons to whom 
we refer may not be aware of the true state of the 
case, we cannot but conjecture that there is some- 
thing behind to account for their position. The 
human reason, when acting in pure independence, 
is the least logical, the most unreasonable agent that 
can be named. Still, we ought not to ascribe so 
singular a phenomenon as that under consideration 
to mere caprice, unless it can be accounted for in no 
other way. To admit that there is a God, and yet 






PANTHEISM IN ITS THEORETIC FORM. 19 

to say that He has no personal qualities or attributes, 
sounds indeed, to Christian ears, like trifling ; it 
seems as much as to say, with one breath, that God 
is, and with the next, that He is not. But may 
there not be something behind and beyond — some- 
thing to account for this apparent contradiction, to 
harmonize this seeming discrepancy % May we not 
guess at a basis of some sort on which these state- 
ments rest, and may there not be some baleful light 
in which, if viewed, they will assume a horrible con- 
sistency ? I think and hope to show that this is the 
case ; that the apparently flippant denials of God's 
providence, and power, and active interest and inter- 
ference in our affairs, are all cognate to a philosophic 
scheme of great gravity and importance ; that these 
assertions are not the assertions of levity, but the 
postulates of intellectual rebellion against the truth; 
that these opinions are not mere heterogeneous notions 
thrown carelessly together, or uttered just as they 
chance to rise to the surface in the seething-pot of 
this uneasy, bubbling, frothy mind of ours, but part 
and parcel of a well-conceived and carefully digested 
theory. By that theory only can they be explained. 
That theory is the theory of Pantheism. So that if 
one should ask what the popular language of the day 
means, and why any one should refuse to admit a 
personality in Almighty God, why any man should 
think concerning Him, not as we Christian believers 
think, but as if He were like unto an aeriform fluid, 



20 PANTHEISM IN ITS THEORETIC FORM. 

a gas, a force, an element, the true answer would be 
that the explanation of these strange notions must 
be sought in the theory of Pantheism. It is not, 
of course, intended to say that all who hold the loose 
speech so often heard about us accept and profess 
the system to which that kind of speech belongs ; 
but we affirm that the connection between the sys- 
tem and the language is direct. The pantheistic 
theory is the proper and natural theory of intellec- 
tual philosophy regarded as independent of revela- 
tion ; and by it only can these conceptions, which 
otherwise were mere fantastic crudities, be explained. 
Hence may be inferred the vast importance of an 
acquaintance w T ith that execrable system ; for, when 
once a man has mastered it he will know the real 
meaning of what he hears, and he shall never again 
be at a loss to explain these false, delusive dreams 
about Almighty God. For the whole system is one 
vast dream, one shapeless sea of gloom and woe, 
without light, without life, cold, remorseless, devour- 
ing — an abyss in which all honest conviction is en- 
gulfed, all manly belief buried — and the opinions to 
which we have referred are but the vapors of the 
surface of that waste, the steam from its unwhole- 
some face. 

Let us then, without delay, proceed to consider 
the theory of Pantheism in its abstract and philo- 
sophic form, that having measured the depth thereof, 
and having learned, by lead and plummet, the foul- 



PANTHEISM IN ITS THEORETIC FORM. 21 

ness of the slime below, we may forever abhor the 
system as it deserves to be abhorred, and denounce 
it as it ought to be denounced. 

The theory of Pantheism may be thus expressed : 
it asserts the unity and identity of substance, and 
denies to the finite any real existence apart from the 
infinite. I hasten, however, to present these thoughts 
in more popular terms. It is held by the main- 
tainers of the system now under consideration that 
there is only one substance throughout the universe. 
Of that substance everything is formed. The sea 
and the dry land, the mountain and the river, the 
bird and the beast, the flowers and the trees, the 
bodies and souls of men, the skies, the stars, the 
suns, the world, the universe throughout, all are of 
one and the selfsame substance. It matters not 
what differences or what varieties there be in form, 
figure, properties, or uses ; all things at last are es- 
sentially one and the same. " Unit?/ and identity of 
substance." This is the pantheistic principle. Earth, 
air, fire, water, all at last, one. The ground on 
which you walk is substantially the same as you that 
walk on it. The book in which you read is of the 
same substance as your mind which comprehends it. 
This pulpit in which I preach is of the same sub- 
stance as I. All things one and the same. But 
where is God? you ask. Ah, brethren, this one 
substance is God also. This substance is the only 
God. 



22 PANTHEISM IN ITS THEORETIC FORM. 

But how did the world, in its present state, come 
into existence \ That is the question which the 
philosophers profess to answer. They speak with 
contempt of the Catholic dogma of creation, styling 
it " The Manufacture Theory," They find it impos- 
sible to conceive of a Deity who is able to cause 
anything to be which was not before ; and they pro- 
pose to give us in place of the ridiculous idea of a 
production, by manufacture, as they term it, a ra- 
tional, intelligible, and satisfactory explanation of 
the origin of the universe. Let us hear this ex- 
planation and consider how charmingly it smoothes 
the way before us, and how admirably it is fitted to 
satisfy the religious and candid mind. 

The universe was not created ; it came by devel- 
opment or emanation. Does any one comprehend 
what that means 1 

If it means anything intelligible, or if we may 
gather its meaning by study of the whole tenor of 
their thoughts, that meaning would seem to be as 
follows : — 

There is but one single substance throughout the 
universe. That substance is eternal; there never 
was a time before which it was not. So existing 
from eternity, it had no personality nor any quali- 
ties, attributes, or powers, such as we understand to 
belong to persons and to constitute them such. It 
was without consciousness, without knowledge, with- 
out activity. It was; no more. The idea thus 






PANTHEISM IN ITS THEORETIC FORM. 28 

presented to us is that of a vast, illimitable flood ; 
of a great, unfathomable deep ; of a hollow silence, 
a heavy unconsciousness, a condition, mute, speech- 
less, thoughtless. Imagine, if you can, this inde- 
scribable, this immense condition, or mass, or state, 
(or by whatever name you may choose to call it,) and 
you have before you the only eternal being. Let us 
apply to it, for the sake of convenience, the term 
God. 

Such, then, from eternity ; still, sombre, vast, 
infinite ; without knowledge, or thought, or action, 
or result ; such would this substance ever have re- 
mained but for an agency within itself. That agency 
was a kind of inner movement. The mass so in- 
describable, so incomprehensible, was agitated from 
within by an equally indescribable and incomprehen- 
sible motion. There was, from within, a tendency 
toward the surface. The great belly of blackness 
and unconscious horror, rumbled as it were, and the 
abyss, for it seems no better, was in labor and would 
bring forth. The result of this movement was seen 
in the uprising of certain definite forms and shapes. 
The substance, working from within, threw itself out 
into visible phenomena. Thus, there came forth a 
sky ; and thus by aggregation stole forth the planets 
and the stars. And thus, to limit ourselves to this 
mundane sphere, the round world resulted from that 
inner force. The earth was then a part of that 
eternal substance, localized ; a finite form of that 



24 PANTHEISM IN ITS THEORETIC FORM. 

infinite. And since that substance was God, there- 
fore the earth was God. It was God made visible 
in the form of ground, and seas, and hills, and plains. 
The same is affirmed of all the animals. They 
were forms thrown out from that inner germination, 
all of the same substance, and all parts of God, or 
realizations of God. 

We have next to hear the pantheistic explanation 
of the existence of mankind. It has been remarked 
that the eternal substance now spoken of and which 
the pantheists call God, had, at first, no knowledge 
and no consciousness. When, agitated by the inner 
motive force, it threw itself out into visible forms, 
as described, each of those forms expressed some 
tendency, some capability of this eternal substance. 
But as yet it had no consciousness, there was nought 
but a blind appetency, and a pushing forth on every 
hand, and a groping in and through the gloom. At 
length, however, the time arrived at which a higher 
development should take place. For out of these 
unconscious efforts there was at length evolved a 
higher form than any which had yet occurred. This 
new phenomenon, so thrust upward as from the inner 
heave and surge of the vast womb, in some manner 
not explained, suddenly advanced to the perception 
of its own existence. This fraction of the eternal 
substance suddenly perceived the fact expressed in 
the words, " I exist, I am." It saw that it was. 
It beheld in front of it the universe ; it perceived 



PANTHEISM IN ITS THEORETIC FORM. 25 

itself to be therewith, face to face. It was conscious 
at length ; the infinite substance thought and rea- 
soned and took counsel with itself at last. This 
was, of course, God. It was God arriving at a 
higher development than any yet reached. It was 
God coming to the consciousness of Himself. When 
God was only that great illimitable waste, God had 
no knowledge of His own existence, no person- 
ality, no power. When God developed into stars, 
and suns, and an earth, there was as yet no person- 
ality, because they are not persons but things, and 
they were but the substance, — God realized in forms. 
When God developed into trees and animals, there 
were motion, and force, and appetite, and instinct, 
but no more. When, however, at the last, God took 
this higher form and passed to consciousness, then, 
for the first time, God saw Himself; God became 
fully aware of His own existence ; God arrived at 
the knowledge of God in becoming man. Man 
is a developed form of the Eternal Being; he is 
that being reasoning, thinking, perceiving, know- 
ing, speaking. That substance never reasoned, nor 
thought, nor perceived, nor knew, nor spake, before. 
And that substance is eternal and is the only God ; 
and, therefore, God perceives not, nor knows, nor 
reasons, nor thinks, nor speaks, but in man. There 
is the sequence, the clear, necessary conclusion from 
the premises. Man is God come to consciousness 
of Himself; and God has no personality, and no 
consciousness but in man. 



26 PANTHEISM IN ITS THEORETIC FORM. 

This, my hearers, is the philosophic theory which 
underlies the speculative infidelity of the present age 
and the present generation. I leave to another lec- 
ture the work of tracing in its indications a view too 
monstrous, too forbidding, to be openly and boldly 
taught, and would therefore limit the remainder of this 
evening's observations to reflection on the prospect 
to which that theory would invite us. Look about 
you, then, and consider how, according to that sys- 
tem, you must interpret, and how understand, the phe- 
nomena which meet your eyes. All that you behold 
is the one eternal substance in divers forms. There 
is nothing eternal but that substance. The forms 
are not eternal ; that only is eternal of which they 
are made up. So that all which you see is part 
and parcel of God. There never was a creation. 
The story in Genesis about the six days is but a 
fable. There is no Creator, and therefore nothing 
was made. All things have come to be what they 
are in their own times and seasons by development, 
without a plan, without a purpose, without the guid- 
ance and direction of a mind. An impersonal and 
eternal substance is the only God. These outward 
shapes on which we look are the figures which that 
impersonal essence has taken, without consciousness 
and without method. All visible phenomena are 
God; God under certain conditions of size, of color, 
of property. Look at the dull, inert stones of the 
wilderness ; it is God sleeping. Look at the brutes 
endowed with instinct, but without intellect ; that is 



PANTHEISM IN ITS THEORETIC FORM. QT/ 

God dreaming. Look at the thing which we call 
man ; that is God thinking, reasoning, desiring, 
willing. The sky spread over all in its vaporous, 
palpitating blue ; that is the eternal substance spread- 
ing itself forth as a firmament above. The seas 
slow heaving to the sunlight, or dark below the noc- 
turnal shade ; they are the same eternal substance, 
moaning through zone and hemisphere in blind pur- 
suit of higher realizations. The mountain ranges, 
those spinal columns of this earthly frame, they are 
but God, the eternal substance, consolidated in pro- 
gressive development. Nor may the survey cease 
at this point. As with material nature so with spir- 
itual ; they are one. The mind of man is sub- 
stantially one with his body. The spirit, the soul, 
the affections, have no real existence apart from the 
corruptible frame in which they dwell. They are 
but higher manifestations of the same eternal sub- 
stance, the highest to which, by inward movement, 
it has yet attained.* And as for all and each of 
these, material and immaterial, corporeal and spir- 
itual alike, no one of them has promise or prospect 
of permanence, for nothing is eternal but that one 
universal substance, and no mind guides its de- 
velopment ; therefore, there can be no foretelling 
its future directions. The skies, the seas, the hills, 
may all pass away, and other formations take their 
place. A few years and there may be left no insect, 
no bird, no gentle beast. A few ages and there 
* See Note A. 



28 PANTHEISM IN ITS THEORETIC FORM. 

may exist no trace of man. The substance which 
now shows itself in these present forms is ever agi- 
tated from below and from within ; and not one form 
is permanent; not the earth, not man, not the soul. 
All came forth by unconscious and unintelligent de- 
velopment. All is moving on and passing away. 
The finite has no real existence. Man himself is 
but a transient phenomenon, — a shadow, — and all 
his works are dreams rather than realities. Before 
this world was evolved there was no personal agent 
to determine what should be; and now that it ex- 
ists there is no reason why it should remain ; no will 
orders its continuance, no intelligent power keeps it 
in being. There is not a form that hath permanency; 
there is nothing visible or invisible that can last. 
The material of yonder columns is fully as durable 
as your souls ; the whole thing is but a passing 
show. All came forth out of darkness; all is drawn 
in perpetually and swallowed up. Everything per- 
ishes but the one substance; that does not perish, 
for that is God. 

To revolt with horror from this appalling theory, 
to cry aloud against it, to stop the ear to its merci- 
less, its diabolical utterances, this must surely be the 
course of every healthy mind. In its naked form, 
as now presented, it might be almost universally re- 
pelled and rejected. But I maintain that this is the 
system on which all the speculative infidelity of our 
age does actually rest, and that it contains the only 



PANTHEISM IN ITS THEORETIC FORM. QQ 

logical explanation of the popular heresies touching 
the impersonality of the Divine Being. This con- 
sanguinity it will be my design in the next lecture to 
display so clearly that even the unlearned must rec- 
ognize it. And, to approach the conclusion of the 
present remarks, let no one flatter himself with the 
idea that a system such as this could never attain a 
hold upon the public mind. Why might it not? 
What should restrain its growth were it not resisted 
and kept under by the word and sacramental power 
of the Holy Ghost \ There are parts of the globe 
to-day wherein this system flourishes as the basis of 
the popular religion ; and even here, where we hold 
high conceptions of our intelligence, there are writ- 
ers and teachers whose thoughts are steeped in this 
poisonous compound, and who, notwithstanding, are 
esteemed and eulogized as the wisest and most ju- 
dicious of men. But while we admit with shame 
that this is the case, we are glad to remember the 
history of the past and to observe how certainly the 
truth reasserts itself, though for the time depressed. 
Wherever they have thrown away the glorious faith 
in the living God and have lain them down in pan- 
theistic dreams, the race has declined, men have 
fallen into degradation and intellectual torpor, and 
the way for the inevitable reaction has been prepared. 
In time the truth avenges itself. It did so memora- 
bly in the seventh century. About the year of our 
Lord 600, when the East lay sleeping and buried in 



80 PANTHEISM IN ITS THEORETIC FORM. 

the philosophic stupor, its limbs relaxed, its energies 
gone, on a sudden, and in the dead midnight, the 
avenger came. There arose in Arabia a man mighty 
in word and deed, whose mission seemed to be (and 
I doubt not that he had a mission) to revive that 
grand, that sacred truth, the personality and unity 
of God. Mohammed did not live in vain. Infidel 
though he was, impostor though he was, he yet 
spake truth when he denied the pantheistic lie, when 
he asserted a God creator of heaven and earth, when 
he affirmed that God alone is from eternity, that all 
things were made by His mind, His hand, His will, 
that He and His universe are in substance distinct. 
That was the creed of Mohammed. In that name 
the scimitars flashed to the light. In that name 
those scimitars swept the rank fields like the sickles 
through the standing grain. In that name his fol- 
lowers overran the East, the Persian empire and old 
Assyria, the African wilds, the far Cathay, the shores 
of Indus and the Ganges. It was but one word of 
truth against the brood, voluminous and intermina- 
ble, of philosophy. One word of truth, but that 
word enough, the truth that God is God. Before 
the Saracens everything fell, simply because there 
was life in their creed, and because the countries that 
they overran were morally, intellectually, spiritually, 
physically dead. Before the Saracens everything 
fell. Everything, for a time, but not forever. Every- 
thing, till they were met, at the West, by the soldiers 



PANTHEISM IN ITS THEORETIC FORM. 31 

of the cross; by men who had a higher faith, a 
fuller knowledge, even the faith in the high and un- 
divided Trinity, sublimest of all truths, the faith in 
Jesus Christ and Him crucified, grandest and most 
consoling of all that the mind of man hath received. 
There, against the cross-hilted swords of the good 
knights, was the scimitar broken. But elsewhere 
it did its work and well. Remember now for your 
comfort, that its main strength lay in its proclama- 
tion of one personal and living God to people who 
denied that personality and who confounded the Cre- 
ator and His works. And I would ask, in conclu- 
sion, if this were the case when human agents alone 
were visibly engaged, — if the mere idea of the exist- 
ence of such a being could so transform, strengthen, 
nerve the men who held it, — if the absence of that 
idea could so have demoralized and degraded the 
men who had lost it, — what should be the effect of 
the appearance among us of that very Being himself] 
He cometh now, He cometh at the last. Oh that it 
be not in burning wrath against the falsehoods of 
mankind! Oh that it be not in judgment, but in 
mercy ! But be it as it may, cease we not our 
confession of Him as He is revealed unto us in the 
Church's Creed ; and as for the theories of the schools 
of the day, let them be to us as the accursed thing 
wherein the children of the Lord will have no deal- 
ings whatever, lest they commit folly in Israel and 
be consumed at the last and awful account. 



32 PANTHEISM IN ITS APPLICATIONS, 



LECTURE III. 

PANTHEISM IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 

It was our object, in the preceding lecture, to 
present the system commonly known by the name 
of Pantheism, in its correct, scientific form. You 
are now aware that the word is not a mere vague 
term, nor one which may be loosely applied to 
almost any error against which the controversialist 
may desire to protest ;' but that it is the distinctive 
appellation of a theory as clear, as consistent, as in- 
telligible as any that the mind of man or devil ever 
framed to hide the truth of God. 

Having displayed the scheme in its crude form 
and in its technical expression, our next step must 
be to trace it in its practical applications. The 
system has a history of its own.* It is first en- 
countered by the student when he investigates the 
Brahminism of India ; and it formed the basis of 
the Egyptian and Chaldean religions, and of the 
philosophy of Greece. It was revived by the' Al- 
exandrine school, in the vain attempt to resist and 
oppose the advancing power of the faith of Jesus 
Christ. In the Middle Ages it again appeared ; 
* See Note B. 



PANTHEISM IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 33 

and after some preludes and preparatory motions, it 
burst forth once more, full formed, in the fifteenth 
and sixteenth centuries. In modern times it has 
been taught with assiduity by the French and Ger- 
man metaphysicians, who have accurately reproduced 
the principles of the ancient paganism ; and from 
these new sources its leading ideas have been once 
more diffused throughout the province of human 
thought, in all their traditional antagonism to natural 
and revealed religion. 

You must, therefore, observe that there has been 
in the world from very ancient times a vast meta- 
physical and historic doctrine, invented by men, and 
displacing the revelations made to them from time 
to time by our heavenly Father. Towards this 
scheme the mind naturally gravitates the instant it 
throws away the ideas of submission and obedience, 
and enters upon the path of free and licentious 
speculation.* This theory is now alive and active ; 
and it forms the secret inspiration of the rationalistic 
systems of the day. We do not assert that it is 
held, to any considerable extent, in the shape in 
which it was exhibited in the preceding lecture. 
Few writers or speakers in this community would 
openly profess the pantheistic creed in the terms in 
which it has been formalized abroad. But we claim 
that the system has attained to an influence unsus- 
pected by those who have not looked into this 

* See Note C. 
3 



34 PANTHEISM IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 

subject with attention. The historic, ethical, and 
psychological schemes of the " liberal " writers of 
the day have been framed alongside of this great 
heresy; and the popular idea of progress, apart 
from Christianity, and independent of religion and 
revelation, is but an application of its fatal princi- 
ples. The doctrine of which we speak is every- 
where and in everything. Its signs may be traced 
in quarters where the word " Pantheism" is repudi- 
ated. Its presence may be discovered in the very 
midst of those who know it not by name. Its 
secret workings are betrayed in speculations ac- 
counted harmless by the characteristic indifference 
of the day. If this be so, and if the age be full of 
pantheistic tendencies, if the metaphysical, moral, 
and social sciences be infected with them, though 
their maintainers and teachers ignore or conceal the 
fact, then must it be a matter of prime importance 
to trace the influence and operations of the system 
wherever they may be discerned, and to show how 
men may be tempted, seduced, tainted, poisoned by 
it almost at unawares. 

But let me dwell for a moment on the fact that 
a system may exercise great power even where in 
its theoretic shape it is not understood. A man 
needs not to have an intelligent — or, so to express 
it, a philosophical — knowledge of a system, in order 
to be influenced or governed by it. Although quite 
ignorant of it, he may notwithstanding be wholly in 



PANTHEISM IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 35 

its power. Much of our action, physical and moral, 
is involuntary action. Take, for example, Christians 
in general, how few there are who have a thorough 
and what we should call a scientific knowledge of all 
the articles of the Creed ! It is not necessary that 
they should. The scientific knowledge of the faith 
is what we term the " Science of Theology." But 
theology is the study of a very limited number. It 
is not necessary that every Christian should be a 
theologian ; it is neither necessary nor possible. To 
hold the Creed, to live thereafter, to be moulded by 
Church principles, to be thus fitted for heaven, all 
this may be without any scientific theological ac- 
quaintance with the dogmas of religion. Nor is 
this true alone of things ethical and spiritual ; it is 
true of things physical as well. How little is ordi- 
narily known of the science of common things ! 
What a world of wisdom and wonder is there all 
about us, and yet how little is it understood ! But 
such scientific acquaintance with the material world 
is, for the masses of the community, unnecessary 
and unattainable. A knowledge of the science of 
anatomy is not indispensable to enable one to walk. 
He who is ignorant of even the rudiments of phys- 
iology digests and breathes as well as the profound- 
est student of that branch of knowledge. The sol- 
dier fights well and wins the victory though he have 
no conception of the plan of the battle. But what 
is true of the good is just as true of the evil. What 



36 PANTHEISM IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 

is true of Catholic theology is just as true of heresy. 
As, on the one hand, a man may guide his way by 
holy principles with which he has no formal ac- 
quaintance, and may beautifully exemplify in his life 
the power of a system which he would be utterly at 
a loss to comment on or to explain, so on the other 
hand may a man be holding and acting on principles 
subversive of revelation, while he is without a sus- 
picion of their origin, their connections, their con- 
sequences. The very man who would revolt at the 
theory of Pantheism nakedly stated, may yet be hold- 
ing the essentials of that system. He may be advo- 
cating pure pantheistic principles, though he knows 
nought of the scientific form of that monstrous 
scheme. Two things, therefore, are necessary: First, 
to see the thing itself just as it is, to discern its form 
and features, to visit the lair and to look at the mon- 
ster in the remote retired places of its retreat ; and 
secondly, to trace its footprints outside, to show 
where it has been and how it has wrought, though 
itself unseen, to convince men in a word that they 
may be its bond-slaves, though they have never looked 
on the face of their tyrant. The former of these 
necessary works was performed in the preceding 
lecture. To the latter will this present lecture be 
devoted. 

What, then, are the offspring of this most repul- 
sive parent % and what the brood which comes forth 
from this abominable womb % Let us consider. 



PANTHEISM IN ITS APPLICATIONS. &J 

The crime of Pantheism is this : that it removes 
God entirely from the scheme of the universe. It 
leaves no place, no work for God. It is a theory 
with which the idea of a personal, an intelligent, a 
living, thinking, speaking, acting God is wholly in- 
compatible. Although it admit the terms " God " 
and "the Deity," yet it does so merely for con- 
venience or as a concession to the popular belief. 
But the personal God, the eternal God, the creator, 
the ruler, the redeemer, the judge, the God who is 
infinitely distinct from his works, this God has no 
place in the pantheistic scheme. 

The leading principles of the scheme are these : 

Firstly, that the universe is substantially eternal. 

Secondly, that things are what they are, not by 
creation, but by emanation and development. 

Thirdly, that the order of events is not determined 
by a mind outside the world, but is a sequence from 
laws within it. 

Fourthly, that all movement and advance and ac- 
cession are from within and not from without. 

It may therefore be stated as probable or certain 
that all propositions, all theories, all views which 
suppose or imply the absence of a personal God, and 
attach a quality of dignity, sufficiency, divinity, to 
finite things, are logically connected with the dark 
and hopeless system of which we are treating, and 
ought to be referred to it as to their genealogical 
tree. I propose to illustrate this proposition by 
reference to these six tendencies of our day. 



38 



PANTHEISM IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 



very 



Firstly, the tendency to assign to the world 
high antiquity. 

Secondly, the tendency to make of history a fa- 
tuitous and fatal sequence of events. 

Thirdly, the tendency to represent mankind as 
having been originally a set of barbarians but little 
if at all above the brutes. 

Fourthly, the tendency to exalt the human reason 
above revelation. 

Fifthly, the tendency to affect an ignorance about 
God. 

And sixthly, the tendency to deny all and any ob- 
jective truth. 

There are many developments of Pantheism be- 
sides these, but to the consideration of these will 
our present remarks be limited. 

And first. We often hear the Mosaic account of 
the creation impugned on the ground that the world 
must be much older than that account would seem 
to make it. We are told that the earth must have 
existed in its present state very much longer than 
the account in Genesis would lead us to suppose, 
and we are informed that there are grounds for as- 
signing a very great antiquity to the human race. 
It is asserted that in ancient geological formations 
there have been found the remains of implements 
which must have been made by men, or bones which 
must have belonged to human beings ; and that their 
presence in such positions proves the existence here 
on earth of men long before the times of Adam and 



PANTHEISM IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 39 

Eve. Now it is not designed to discuss these points, 
but simply to trace the relationship of particular 
views and opinions. And all these theories, — of 
the very great age of this globe, in its present form, 
of the very remote antiquity of the human race, — 
these we hold to be but tendencies toward the pan- 
theistic position of the eternity of matter. Men 
do not like to say so ; they would not admit it ; but 
the appetency is that way. They long to get rid 
of the Mosaic history simply because it is the his- 
tory of a creation by God. Indulge them in this 
desire, permit them to date back the origin of this 
present order of things, say sixty thousand years, 
and they will next insist on carrying it back six 
hundred thousand ; they will look farther and far- 
ther backward for its origin toward the eternity 
which at length they would demand. Whenever 
you hear these views expressed, ascribe them to their 
proper place. To claim that the earth and man, as 
now existing, are of very great and vast antiquity, 
is hesitatingly to move towards the assertion that all 
matter and all substance are eternal. It is, to feel 
that way, to try you whether you will follow, to in- 
vite you toward the brink of that gulf. Such opin- 
ions are advanced, for the most part, by those who 
give themselves to scientific study, and neglect or 
decline to hear the word of God, by such as deal 
exclusively or mainly in physical science, by such as 
hold the modern forms of science to be completed 



40 PANTHEISM IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 

and perfect, rather than what they are, conjectural 
shapes which another century's discoveries and 
growth may revolutionize and wholly change. 

And secondly, you find persons at this day who 
would make of history a fortuitous or fatal sequence 
of events. This is of the essence of Pantheism. 
Whenever any one speaks of the history, whether 
of the world at large or of any particular tribe or 
family or nation, as if some finite agents controlled, 
some finite power directed it, you are ignorant, in- 
deed, if you know not precisely what this means and 
implies. As, in the pantheistic scheme, there is no 
place for a Creator, so there is none for a Governor. 
" O Lord, our Governor, how excellent is Thy name 
in all the world ! " This is the language of the 
Church. But such language cannot be uttered by 
philosophy. On the other hand, you hear such prop- 
ositions as these : — that history is but the result of 
the development of the human mind ; that the eras 
and epochs of history are times at which some idea 
prevails so powerfully as to rule and guide the course 
of affairs ; that the careers of nations are but the 
steps and pathway of successive dominant thoughts ; 
that at each epoch constitutions and governments, 
art and letters, religion and morals, are determined 
as to their quality or character by a common motive 
principle, the spirit of the age ; that the develop- 
ment of the absolute essence, that eternal substance 
of which we spoke, is always taking increasingly 



PANTHEISM IN JTS APPLICATIONS. 41 

perfect manifestations. The basis of these and all 
similar statements is one and the same, — the denial 
that God bears any active and intelligent part in the 
regulation and direction of the affairs of nations or 
men. He who makes that denial may perhaps ac- 
knowledge that a God exists. But what and who 
is a God who is nowhere efficiently, and who does 
and knows and sees nothing ? It is a mere delusion. 
If you separate God from the historical course of 
this world, you thereby play into the hands of those 
who, in their impious theory, would remove Him not 
from history alone, but from the universe, and from 
our very thoughts. The idea that history is but a 
fatal sequence of events is an idea of Pantheism, 
and as near to it as a rib taken from its very side. 

But thirdly, you will hear it often said that men 
in their original state were rude barbarians and 
grovelling degraded savages. It is asserted that 
the first men went on all-fours ; that they had no 
intelligible language ; that they lived on roots ; that 
they were but a step above the beasts of the field : 
then that they advanced by degrees to their present 
state; that they invented language; that they formed 
themselves into society ; that they arrived by degrees 
at the possession of laws, arts, religion. Now what 
does all this mean, and with what theory is it allied ? 
With none save that theory of development which 
is part and parcel of the pantheistic scheme, and has 
no logical relation to any other philosophy under 



42 



PANTHEISM IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 



heaven. When you hear any one talk of a supposed 
original brute-like condition of mankind, — when you 
hear the assertion that language is the invention of 
man and not the gift of God to us, — when you hear 
of the successive acquirements of our race, and of 
their actual position as far superior to any enjoyed 
by them heretofore, — mistrust the speaker, or rather 
be sure that he too is anchored fast, though he per- 
chance may not know it, to the pantheistic platform. 
For, according to that theory, there was no God to 
make man, no God to teach him, no God to en- 
lighten him ; therefore, he developed by degrees to 
what he is become. And back of all this miserable 
trifling about a primitive state of utter barbarism, 
and about a language of growls or grunts slowly 
working up to the fulness of such a system as the 
English tongue, — back of all this lie the less con- 
spicuous but not worse downfalls of the doctrine 
that man was a brute before he became a man, and 
before that a fish, and before that a gluten, and be- 
fore that an infusorial point. It is all part and par- 
cel of one and the same falsehood, that things are 
what they are, not because God made them so, but 
because the eternal substance developed blindly into 
these forms. And that is the tenet of Pantheism. 
In the fourth place, brethren, I call your attention 
to the evident vestiges and foot-tracks of this heresy 
in all that you hear so often and so boastfully said 
of the sufficiency of the human reason to itself, and 



PANTHEISM IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 43 

of its power of independent and salutary action 
apart from the revelation of God. If there be no 
God whose mind made known to it shall constitute 
the law of human thought, then indeed must the 
reason be regarded as adequate to itself. But to 
say that it is thus adequate is to imply that there is 
no God. All, therefore, that we hear of the native 
powers of man, of the sufficiency of the human 
mind, of our ability to formalize all faith, all works, 
all belief, all duty, after our own will, all that men 
claim as a kind of royal prerogative and birthright 
in this behalf, smells of the system under discussion. 
Reflect, again, my hearers, that under that system 
there is really no God distinct from the common 
substance of which we all are parts ; that the human 
mind is that substance, or a portion of it ; that the 
human consciousness is that substance recognizing 
and comprehending itself. This tenet, although 
blasphemous, is in fact the real ground and source 
of all the high claims in behalf of the reason of man ; 
it is associated with them, and they are affiliated 
with it. Why should we be bidden to rely upon 
mr native powers alone, except that they who so 
exhort us doubt the existence of any other powers 
in which to rest \ If there be no God, the reason 
must be sufficient to itself; and if you claim for it 
such sufficiency, you are practically denying the need 
of a God. I point you, therefore, to all these state- 
ments and to all these claims made and set up by 



44 PANTHEISM IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 

men in the pride and naughtiness of their hearts, 
and affirm that however they may be smoothed over 
or toned down, or qualified for decency's sake, or 
through fear of pushing matters to extremes, there 
is underneath, notwithstanding, the same rank poi- 
son. No man can serve two masters. If you 
make of intellect a God, you dethrone the true God, 
and cast Him out. There is but one choice for the 
mind, — to submit to God, or to curse Him and die. 
And fifthly, the presence of pantheistic error may 
be detected in another direction ; as when any one is 
found affecting an ignorance of God, which he as- 
cribes to the extreme difficulty of knowing Him. 
This sometimes sounds like a sheer affectation, and 
it seems to be fashionable and is thought to be im- 
pressive, especially among the poets. But there is 
something beneath. It is a solemn trifling with the 
hope of the world. In knowledge of God standeth 
our eternal life. In knowledge of Him and of His 
word modern civilization has been built up. What 
were man if he knew not God at all % And how 
much below his rightful place if he know Him but 
imperfectly'? Therefore, to say that there is any su- 
preme difficulty about knowing God, or learning of 
God, or coming to Him, is to imperil the very bond 
of all our strength, the very spring of all our hopes. 
Yet this is just what men do: affected men, con- 
ceited men, who stop their ears to His voice, and 
then complain that they can hear nothing; who turn 



PANTHEISM IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 45 

their faces away, and then morbidly lament their mis- 
fortune in not enjoying the sight of Him. Distrust 
all this fashionable, this modern, this poetical cant 
(for you find it full often in our nineteenth-century 
poets) about the dimness of all the future and the 
dread uncertainties of our position, and the sadness 
of our lot in being forced to dwell with doubtfulness 
and uncertainty for our constant companions. Not 
half, not a quarter of this is genuine. In a Christian 
land like ours, in any land where there flourishes a 
branch of Christ's Church, there is no real difficulty 
in knowing God. We all know Him well enough for 
practical purposes. We all know Him well enough 
for our eternal salvation, and there are those who 
know Him too well for their soul's peace. When- 
ever you hear this disavowed, — whenever you hear 
loose, vague talk about God, as though it were next 
to impossible to satisfy one's self who He is, or what 
He is, or where He is, how He exists, how He has 
acted, or is acting now, whether He be or be not a 
person as we are persons, — then mistrust the words 
and look beneath for the scales, and the cloven feet, 
and the slime of the vast heresy of the ages. Pan- 
theism has for her office to obscure all clearness of 
view, to destroy the power of lucid thought about 
the Deity, — making of Him, not a person, but an 
abstraction ; not a being, but an influence or impres- 
sion ; not a reality, but a shadowy intangibility ; not 
a Creator and Governor distinct from that world 



46 PANTHEISM IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 

which He governs and created, but a kind of chem- 
ical base of the world ; not a Lord upon the throne 
of the universe, but an all-pervading substance, with- 
out concentration, intelligence, power, force, or will. 
Such a God is utterly inconceivable, utterly unim- 
aginable ; a fleeting phantom to mock the weary 
sight, the stumbling foot, the empty hand. And the 
loose, discursive speech about the difficulty of know- 
ing Him is true alone on the hypothesis that He is 
such a nonentity as has been described. 

And sixthly, and finally, you may rest assured of 
the presence of pantheistic error in every case of de- 
nial of objective truth, of truth apart from him who 
holds it to be true. For there are those who tell 
us that all is true to him which any man thinks to 
be true. This is to say that the truth is in us, in 
our consciousness and in our thoughts. And there 
are those who say that every man may believe just 
as he chooses to believe, — as much, as little. This 
is to say that there is nothing which any of us ought 
to believe to his soul's health. Down these chasms 
the truth slides helplessly away, — for they are 
chasms, and below are spread the black, deep waters 
of the same heresy, the limbus of the lost, — for 
these denials of a truth outside of us, apart from us, 
independent of us, are based upon the assumption 
that all is one and the same substance, and that all 
things which we see are but transient and temporary 
modifications thereof. In face of such a principle 



PANTHEISM IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 4T/ 

no doctrine, no fact, no article of faith, could for one 
moment live. When men say that what any one 
thinks to be true is true for him; that for truth we 
must look within ; that every one of us is, in his 
sphere, the judge of truth; that each man's mind 
shall dictate or determine his belief, and that each 
man's feelings do witness infallibly to his true condi- 
tion; — when they say these things, they do but flat- 
ter with their lips and dissemble in their double heart. 
For it is to say, that there is no truth ; nothing 
outside; all within. This is the pantheistic dogma. 
Nothing outside this world ; nothing greater, wiser, 
better, nobler than the human mind ; no evidence 
so good as internal evidence ; no test of use against 
a man's deliberate convictions. And in such a 
scheme there can be nothing but truth ; there can 
be no error and no falsehood, no wrong, no evil ; all 
is good, and true, and right, and excellent; for all is 
God. I care not what schools of theology this may 
touch, what man's views it may impugn ; but let it 
be affirmed, that he who says that you may repose 
secure in any Creed, if conscientious, — that you 
should rest, not in outward forms and agencies, but 
on inward feelings and conviction, — this man is play- 
ing into the hands of Pantheism, is helping on the 
work of those who would bind you and give you 
over to the monster, hand and foot. 

Brethren, there is no proof that the earth in its 
present state has that high antiquity which the phi- 



48 PANTHEISM IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 

losophers claim. And man was not at first a semi- 
brute; but God made him perfect, and saw the work 
that it was very good. And history is not a play 
of chance or fate, but a drama conducted by God 
in person. And God is not far off, and hard to 
know, but close to us and easy of access ; nor hath 
He ever left Himself without a witness among His 
creatures. And the human mind is not sufficien 
to itself, but is without His revelation just where 
the eye is without light. And truth is not variable, 
but constant ; not within us, but without, for us to 
make it ours, by reaching forth to it from out our- 
selves. And the Catholic religion, which thus con- 
rects all falsehoods, is the only teacher under God 
whom we may safely follow ; and the school of her- 
esy, in which not merely the hard, gaunt theory is 
taught, but all its ingenious applications are made, 
that school is the council-room of confusion, and the 
entrance of ruin for the mind and soul and heart of 
all those who abide and continue therein. 



OBJECTIONS TO THE PANTHEISTIC THEORY. 49 



LECTURE IV. 

OBJECTIONS TO THE PANTHEISTIC THEORY. 

In the previous lectures of this course I have 
endeavored, with what success yourselves must 
judge, to show the scheme of Pantheism, first, in 
its theoretic form, and secondly, in its practical ap- 
plications. Such a division of the subject was ren- 
dered necessary by the fact that the system, in its 
unshorn deformity, is to be found only in the works 
of those scientific writers (especially of the French * 
and German schools) who logically carry out their 
principles and accept and avow the consequences, 
while it is commonly presented to us in the shape 
of dilutions more or less strong. Thus qualified and 
mitigated, however, it is encountered everywhere, — 
in theology, in philosophy, in history, in poetry, in 
the drama, and in the trashy literature of the day. 
To be able to recognize it in its disguised forms, 
one must know it in its natural shape; through 
such knowledge only can the identity between the 
theory and its applications be exhibited. 

I now proceed, in continuation of this subject, to 

speak, first, of the way in which the Pantheists en- 

* See Note D. 
4 



50 OBJECTIONS TO THE PANTHEISTIC THEORY. 

deavor to establish their conclusions ; secondly, of 
the character of their alleged proofs ; thirdly, of the 
objections which lie against the whole system in the 
consequences resulting therefrom. 

And first, it is to be remarked that the Pantheist, 
in endeavoring to establish his principles, depends 
on certain definitions which he assumes to be correct, 
concerning the infinite and the finite, concerning sub- 
stance and being. He also rests upon a very subtle 
system of the most abstract notions of metaphysics. 
All his philosophy is built on these primary defini- 
tions. My reference is chiefly to the speculative 
writers of the French and German schools. To 
endeavor to understand the language of their sys- 
tems is an almost hopeless task, and yet it is evident 
that the main strength of those systems lies in this 
scientific jargon, and that they depend upon it for 
the success of their so-called demonstrations. But 
it is not from their positive methods only that the 
real position of these philosophers, relatively to the 
rest of mankind, may be inferred : nothing can be 
more significant than the care with which they avoid 
certain lines of argument to which we should expect 
a school aiming at wide influence to resort. For 
example, we never find one of these philosophers 
appealing to that grand old test, the common sense 
of men. We never discern in his writings a dis- 
position to hear and abide by the verdict of the con- 
sent and concurrence of mankind. As to the tra- 



OBJECTIONS TO THE PANTHEISTIC THEORY. 51 

ditional knowledge and faith of our race, he is dumb. 
To the received opinions, to the universal convictions 
of his fellow-beings, he dares not refer. All these 
directions he avoids with a sedulous care which can- 
not be mistaken, for he knows that these things 
are against him. The voice of common sense, the 
traditions that have come down through all time and 
among all nations, the convictions of the wise and 
pious all over the world, the facts of the existence 
of the visible Church of Christ, and the influence of 
the Holy Scriptures, — all these are against the Pan- 
theist. He dares not face these witnesses ; he can- 
not meet them on common ground. He invents his 
subtle system of metaphysics as a necessity of his 
position, because a special and peculiar set of arms, 
offensive and defensive, is required by the man who 
is to appear in conflict with history, and testimony, 
and consent, and experience, and the judgment and 
common sense of all our race. His battle is against 
the mind, the logic, the intelligence, the heart, the 
soul, of the universal human family. 

To speak, in the second place, though briefly, of 
the character of these alleged proofs. Already labor- 
ing, from the very first, under the disadvantage of 
contradiction by every reliable voice to which an ap- 
peal can reasonably be made, they stand convicted of 
weakness in this behalf, — that they are arbitrary in 
themselves, and therefore powerless in result. Each 
science has its language. But the science of Panthe- 



52 OBJECTIONS TO THE PANTHEISTIC THEORY. 

ism is a mere speculative cloud. It has its language 
and its proper terms, and in them lies its strength. 
Yet no man need admit the exactness of its defini- 
tions, nor is it possible for the masters of this science 
to show cause why the world should accept the pecu- 
liar nomenclature which they employ. Unless this 
be done, however, the argument which lives in those 
special definitions must fail. The characteristic lan- 
guage of the school respecting substance, personality, 
unity, the finite and the infinite, matter, spirit, soul, 
truth, certitude, and the like, we Christians may re- 
ject ; and we may demand that the terms to be used 
in all questions touching the existence and nature of 
the Almighty, the being and powers of man, and 
similar topics, shall be such terms as have been fa- 
miliarly known and used in the Church, and may 
be understood of ordinary minds. We may require, 
as a preliminary, that this unintelligible jargon of 
the Rationalists shall cease, and that, in subjects em- 
inently practical, we shall be permitted to know just 
what these teachers mean and whither they would 
lead us. If this be done, the power of the system is 
broken. Opposed by common sense, ignoring the 
realities of our situation, admitting no fact as his- 
toric, explaining no mystery, leaving behind it diffi- 
culties more formidable than those of which it com- 
plained and which it proposed to remove, the tongue 
of this philosophy ceases, and the knowledge there- 
of vanishes away. 



OBJECTIONS TO THE PANTHEISTIC THEORY. 53 

I proceed to speak, thirdly, of the objections to 
this philosophy in respect to the consequences which 
it involves. And since this is by far the most impor- 
tant branch of the subject, it is to its full treatment 
that the remainder of this lecture will be devoted. 

The first consequence from the Pantheistic philos- 
ophy to which I shall advert is this : that, according 
to its principles, the world and man do of necessity 
exist, and that they are part of God Himself. From 
eternity has there been this so-called universal sub- 
stance. But the being which is from eternity is not 
contingent and relative, but absolute and necessary. 
The world, however, is but that substance realized 
in certain visible forms, and man is that substance 
arrived at its highest manifestation thus far ; and 
therefore the world and man have, as to their sub- 
stance, a necessary existence. Again, that substance, 
in its entirety, is God, and the world and man are 
parts of that substance, and therefore the world and 
man do not merely exist of necessity, but the world 
and man are parts of God. As to this conclusion, 
Pantheism hesitates not to avow it ; nay, it glories 
in it as its most valuable discovery ; and that blas- 
phemous idea, at which the Christian shudders, is 
the first of the inestimable boons bestowed by this 
infidel philosophy on mankind. 

But, secondly, it follows not less clearly, from the 
principles now under consideration, that God is ab- 
solutely dependent on the world, and absolutely de- 



54 OBJECTIONS TO THE PANTHEISTIC THEORY. 

pendent upon man. We have been trained in the 
Church to think of God as the sovereign Lord of 
all ; but the God of Pantheism is weak, and speech- 
less, and unconscious, and powerless, without the 
universe and without us. For consider, brethren, 
that, according to this philosophy, the eternal sub- 
stance has in itself no shape, no mind, no will, no 
sight, no consciousness ; it attains to these in devel- 
oping upward, and in taking the successive forms of 
the universe. Until it thundered, God had no voice. 
Until there were mountains and hills, and suns and 
moons and stars, God had no definite life. Until 
there were planetary orbits, God had no orderly mo- 
tion. Until there were brutes, God had no instincts, 
no desires, no feeling. Until there were men, God 
had no consciousness, no perception of Himself, no 
will, no thought. Thus He depends on us. It is 
He who lives in us, rather than we in Him. With- 
out the universe, without what we mistakingly call 
His works, He is quite imperfect and incomplete; 
for it is only through the universe that this poor, 
blind, unformed, anomalous being can express itself 
or assert itself. This conclusion inevitably follows 
from the principles of the system ; and this degraded 
and emasculted conception is that which Panthe- 
ism, with ghastly leer, offers us as a substitute for 
the Father, the Redeemer, the Governor, in whom 
thus far the world has trusted itself, and on whom 
we suppose that we depend. 



OBJECTIONS TO THE PANTHEISTIC THEORY. 55 

And thirdly, it is a consequence of this philosophic 
theory that it obliterates those distinctions on the 
existence and realization of which all social, moral, 
and intellectual life and progress depend. There is, 
according to the Pantheistic tenet, no distinction at 
all between the finite and the infinite, all things that 
we see and perceive and know being but parts of 
the one infinite and universal substance. But to 
maintain this principle, to say, as they do whose 
views we are now examining, that the finite has no 
true and separate existence of its own apart from 
the infinite, is to kill the finite by this tremendous, 
this fatal juxtaposition. It results from this idea, (to 
look to that which most nearly concerns ourselves,) 
that men have no real existence of their own, that we 
are but phantoms, that our acts are but imaginary, 
that our lives (as we call them) are but dreams ; for 
w r e are parts or fragments of that ever-developing 
infinite, that ever-progressing infinite, which alone 
has any and all reality. And thus, in like manner, 
the Pantheistic theory destroys effectually all distinc- 
tion between the human reason and the divine, all 
distinction between the life of creatures and the life 
of God. All boundary lines are swept away, all dif- 
ferences disappear, all life, all thought, all reason, all 
existence, are struck and heaped and massed together 
in one monstrous lump, one inconceivable aggre- 
gate. There is a complete identification, or, which is 
the same thing, there remains but one appalling chaos. 



56 OBJECTIONS TO THE PANTHEISTIC THEORY. 

And fourthly, you perceive, brethren, that in this 
system the Personal God disappears utterly from 
view. That grand and beneficent figure, the form 
of the Father of all, is dethroned. As we compre- 
hend the sacred term, there is left no God. A sub- 
stance, impersonal, there is; but we cannot imagine 
that unintelligible, unreasoning, unthinking, unloving 
state of impotence as our Father, our Creator, our 
Redeemer, our Sanctifier, our Friend. The God in 
whom we have believed is gone. In the following 
lecture of this course it is proposed to state, (and 
how refreshing will be the task after this wading 
through the Pantheistic slough !) the full, the true, 
the dear, the blessed conception of the Almighty 
which we have received in the Church and find in 
the sacred Scriptures. Let it be sufficient here to 
remark that such a conception, in connection with 
the system whose tenets are an identity of substance 
throughout the universe and a principle of sponta- 
neous development as the only law of life and prog- 
ress, is merely and absolutely impossible. The God 
of Pantheism is not a person, exists not person- 
ally, has no personal attributes ; it is merely a kind 
of substratum on which everything is founded, a 
kind of material out of which everything is built, 
a kind of great sum total of all things, an enormous 
vortex in which its own concretions whirl round and 
round forever. Oh, what a black and damnable out- 
rage is that which Pantheism attempts to perpetrate ! 



OBJECTIONS TO THE PANTHEISTIC THEORY. 5J 

It would rob the creation of its Maker, the world of 
its Governor, time of its Providential Arbiter, man 
of his Father and Friend ! What greater crime than 
to try this gigantic fraud and to leave us nothing in 
His place ? 

Ah, brethren, those last words were not correct. 
Pantheism does not leave us destitute. It takes 
away God, but it does not leave His place empty. 
Had it done so, our charge against it were not so 
heavy and the wrong were less ; for that is what 
Atheism does, and therefore Atheism is less to be 
feared. For Atheism, denying that there is any God, 
and not undertaking to fill the place which it has 
thus proclaimed to be vacant, leaves behind it a void, 
the void of that negation, a void which cries out to 
be filled, which calls to its object, which craves in- 
cessantly in the torments of hungry despair. The 
void which Atheism thus makes in the universe pro- 
tests against the process by which it was formed ; it 
cries aloud ; accuses the folly of the man who hath 
said there is no God ; it denies the very denial, 
and leaves the victim no refuge but in an utter bru- 
talization, in a completed degradation from which 
he must escape, and from which he cannot escape 
save by coming back to faith. But Pantheism es- 
chews that error. Pantheism is the last device of 
the devil, and by far the subtlest. Atheism is sim- 
ple and blunt ; but Pantheism is crafty and sly. 
Atheism is honest in its way, and by its very hon- 
esty defeats its end. But Pantheism profits by ob- 



58 OBJECTIONS TO THE PANTHEISTIC THEORY. 

servation of the error of its predecessor. It strikes 
out God from the universe ; but it leaves no void, — 
no void to ache and protest and demand mercy. It 
fills the void with a calculating coolness ; it fills it by 
deifying the world and man. 

This is our fifth allegation against the system: 
that it confounds God and the universe in such a 
way as to make of them but one. That it con- 
founds God and man, the divine nature and the 
human, in such wise as to identify them. It de- 
thrones God, but not so as to leave His throne 
empty. It dethrones God, but it sets up man in 
His place. " He, as God, sitteth in the temple of 
God, showing himself that he is God." It trans- 
ports the divine personality into man ; it affirms 
that in man God hath consciousness, affection, will, 
personal existence. It subjects and satisfies the idea 
of the greatness, the majesty, the worthiness of man ; 
it makes of him the real, the only deity : and thus 
the void is filled by the sovereign pride, the end- 
less ambition, the supreme self-confidence of the 
human heart. This thing is worse by far than 
aught that Atheism ever attempted. It is crafty, it 
is malignant, it is immense in audacity; and yet it 
is literally the very thing which the Pantheists have 
done, the last and highest conclusion of their ap- 
proved writers, in whose printed works may these 
atrocious blasphemies be found, line upon line, and 
statement upon statement, until the very hairs of our 
head should stand on end as we read. 



OBJECTIONS TO THE PANTHEISTIC THEORY. 59 

Think then, brethren, in the sixth place, of the 
bearings of this view on certain questions vital to 
us as a race. There follows, as a consequence, the 
reduction of certainty to uncertainty throughout the 
province of thought ; the obliteration of all distinc- 
tion between good and evil, between right and wrong, 
between virtue and vice, in the sphere of morality ; 
for according to the Pantheistic scheme there is no 
divine mind, no divine thought, until the infinite and 
universal substance has developed up to man. In 
man, therefore, that substance first has conscious- 
ness ; in man that substance first thinks. But that 
substance is God ; therefore the thought of man is 
the thought of God, the mind of man the mind of 
God, the speech, the voice of man, are the speech 
and voice of God. Now what does all this mean ? 
This, and no less, — that all the thoughts of any in- 
dividual mind are divine thoughts ; that all the im- 
aginings, the opinions, the views of any mind, of 
every mind, are divine ; that every wish of your 
heart, that every appetite of your soul, that every 
consideration of your intelligent understanding are 
together and alike divine. But, you will say, men 
do not think alike, do not judge alike, do not desire 
alike. It is so. And thus all ideas of any fixed 
and settled permanent quality in thought are lost. 
It follows that there can be no such thing as abso- 
lute and immutable truth : all truth is mobile and 
progressive ; all thoughts are right and true in their 



60 OBJECTIONS TO THE PANTHEISTIC THEORY. 

way. No thought of any human mind can be 
wrong : it may be incomplete, but that is all ; and 
as the idea of an absolute and unchanging truth in- 
dependent of our minds is thus removed, so there 
doth perish in like manner to its merest vestiges the 
idea of a moral law, and of a distinction between 
right and wrong, good and evil, vice and virtue. 
For if man be God thinking and acting, then, as 
all man's thoughts are divine, so must be his acts : 
pride, pleasure, passion, cruelty, ambition, lust, are 
but the necessary development of moral tendencies 
in the original substance. That substance, though 
it have no personality, is supposed to have and to 
hold all possible, all conceivable tendencies within 
itself, and these are developed and evolved in human 
thought, in human desire. All our thoughts are 
divine thoughts, all our desires are divine desires. 
This is what the New England transcendentalists 
have meant all along, in using the pernicious lan- 
guage, that what we call error is only incomplete 
truth, and that what we call evil is only incomplete 
good, — which means, at bottom, that there is no such 
thing as an absolute good and evil, an absolute right 
and wrong. In New England they are cautious 
what they say and how they express themselves ; but 
the Pantheists abroad are more straightforward. 
They stick not at the last conclusion, from the mere 
expression of which one shrinks appalled ; but it 
must be said, it shall be said, to let you look for once 



OBJECTIONS TO THE PANTHEISTIC THEORY, 61 

over the edge and far down into the deep, — they 
have affirmed that the development of man is the de- 
velopment of God too ; that as the primal suhstance 
is advancing it is God who advances ; that He, far 
from being unchangeable, is always improving and 
going forward to what He was not before ; # that 
we cannot conjecture what God may become ; that 
whatsoever appears to be evil is only in appearance 
evil, but, in reality, imperfect good ; that whatever 
appears to be error is not really error, but only im- 
perfect truth; and since all, in thought or act, 
which we call error, evil, vice, is but part of the one 
grand and perpetual progression and development, 
therefore that God is not merely good, truth, and 
virtue, but that He is error, vice, and evil ! So wrote 
a pantheistic philosopher in France; ^ and when he 
penned those words and spoke them abroad, if there 
be ears and eyes in hell to hear and see, that place 
must have rung with applause, and shouts of ap- 
proval must have stormed round all the sides of 
the infernal pit. 

And, brethren, I will detain you with but one 
more of these pictured consequences of this message 
and burden of woe and death. It is the pantheistic 
view of history, — of the history of the ages and of 
nations and of men. History, according to these 
writers, is not ordered by God ; nations are not 

* See Note E. 

f Proudhon : Systeme des Contradictions JSconomiques. 



62 OBJECTIONS TO THE PANTHEISTIC THEORY. 

ruled by God ; individual life is not overlooked by 
God : but history is merely the continued develop- 
ment of humanity. It is supposed by this philoso- 
phy to be divided into epochs. Each of those epochs 
is regarded as a time of the domination of some 
one element of the mind. Nations are the repre- 
resentatives of ideas, and it is the mission of each 
nation to manifest the special idea with which its 
existence is allied ; therefore the part which each 
nation is to play is fixed by a prior necessity, by an 
absolute fate. The idea to be represented by each na- 
tion has connection with the part of the globe which 
the nation occupies, — with climate, physical cir- 
cumstances, temperature, — with commercial advan- 
tages, with natural resources, with the productions 
of the soil. The pantheistic Philosophy supposes 
two things (in its applications to the history of the 
world): first, a law of progress which is not the will 
of God, but an inflexible and inevitable necessity of 
sequence; and secondly, a necessary and absolute 
inspiration in humanity. The ideas of which we 
have spoken are all, in their way, divine; divine, but 
incomplete. They are developed one by one. Each, 
being but a partial view of truth, must, in its turn, 
yield and disappear. History is the record of these 
mutations and transitions, as embodied in the nations 
of the earth ; but at all times and in every age, con- 
stitutions, governments, arts, sciences, religion, have 
but one common root, " the spirit of the age." There 



OBJECTIONS TO THE PANTHEISTIC THEORY. 63 

can be no such thing as national crimes, as national 
injustice, as national wrong. The whole develop- 
ment is good. Through war, rebellion, revolution, 
— through oppression and tyranny and misgovern- 
ment, — through empire, kingdom, democracy, — it 
is all good, it is all well. Call nothing a crime if it 
accords with the spirit of the age. Count nothing 
a virtue if it departs from the spirit of the age. 
Away with the unmeaning terms of law, order, jus- 
tice, liberty, right, wrong, national honor and glory, 
national shame and reproach. These are but empty 
names ; for all is but one progression, one develop- 
ment of the infinite substance, and the shadow which 
you call a nation is as hollow as the spectre which 
you call a hero, a patriot, a traitor, a demi-god. Na- 
tions represent ideas ; and when the idea has been 
expressed, the part of the nation is played. And 
great men are the priests and missionaries of ideas, 
and their careers are valuable for study only in that 
respect. But all moral distinctions, whether as to 
the nation's course or the individual's character, are 
futile and vain. It is but the march of a great 
spirit, — the spirit of the age. 

Here let us pause and draw a long breath of re- 
lief, and stop ; for the work which was proposed is 
done so far as its first object extends. Enough has 
been said of this dreadful heresy. Hereafter we 
shall be refreshed by the consolations of the Gospel, 
and by the blessed message concerning the " One 



64 OBJECTIONS TO THE PANTHEISTIC THEORY. 

God and Father of all," the " One Lord Jesus 
Christ," the Holy Ghost, the Lord and the Life- 
giver, whom we know in the peaceful ways of the 
faith. Referring, therefore, to the next evening the 
examination of the truth, let us, finally, turn the fa- 
tal page of the Philosophy of this world and leave 
its sentences to their proper dust and darkness, with 
thanksgiving unto Him who hath delivered us and 
the human race out of the power of that darkness, 
and hath translated us into the kingdom of His dear 
Son. 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF ALMIGHTY GOD. 65 



LECTURE V. 

THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF ALMIGHTY GOD. 

The time has arrived at which the character of 
these lectures must be changed, arid none can be so 
glad of this as he who has undertaken to prepare 
them. It might indeed appear as though some apol- 
ogy were due for having led you so far and so long 
in the paths of an heretical labyrinth, perhaps more 
cunningly contrived than any other that Satan ever 
made to ensnare and destroy the human soul. But 
still it was necessary to show the disease in full ; 
to probe the wound far down ; to trace, as we have 
done, the whole pantheistic malady, first in its real 
nature, and then in some of its more evident symp- 
toms ; to follow it out to its consequences ; and to 
bring to the light its last and ruinous results. But 
that portion of our work is done. The pantheistic 
conception of God has been distinctly presented ; 
that parody of truth, that destroyer of our hope, 
that contradiction of every positive statement, of 
every assured conviction, has been laid before you 
in the immobility of its fatalism, in the rigidness of 
its monotonous despair. From that dark specimen 
of intellectual aberration may we now right gladly 



66 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF ALMIGHTY GOD. 

turn, betaking us to our home in the Church of God, 
reading in her sacred books the word of truth, and 
contrasting the Almighty as He really is with this 
void and irrational phantom to which a false philos- 
ophy has dared to apply His sacred name. 

" I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, 
Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visi- 
ble and invisible" In this sublime affirmation does 
the Church begin to teach us what to think of the 
Lord Most High. 

When the Church thus speaks to us of Almighty 
God, she speaks : — 

First, of One who hath a proper personal exist- 
ence. 

Secondly, of One who is distinct from the works 
of His hands. 

Thirdly, of One who is most closely connected 
with the world. 

And fourthly, of One who cannot vary or change. 

These are her declarations as against the panthe- 
istic scheme ; and it will be the object of this lecture 
to develop each of these statements in order, and to 
show, as far as the limited time will allow, what each 
one of them implies. 

And first, Almighty God is one who hath, eter- 
nally and essentially, a full, a real, a proper personal 
existence. You all know, brethren, though some 
of you might be at a loss to define in scientific mode, 
what is meant by a person. You all know what is 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF ALMIGHTY GOD. 6J 

intended when we speak of persons as contradistin- 
guished from things. You all know that a stone 
or a tree is not a person ; and that a man or a wom- 
an or a child is. Now, whatever you understand 
to be expressed, or whatever plain, simple-minded 
folk commonly understand to be expressed, by the 
term " a personal existence," such an existence has 
Almighty God. Only that in Him personality 
must have a perfection which it never could have in 
creatures ; because He is every way so incomparably 
greater and better than they. Your dictionaries 
will tell you, if you refer to them, that personality 
is constituted by certain capacities, and particularly 
by the power of conscious thought. A thinking, in- 
telligent being; a being who can contrive and direct; 
who acts knowingly and understandingly ; — that is 
a person. These brief, popular definitions are suf- 
ficient for our purpose, without entering into the 
profounder explanations which theology and phi- 
losophy afford. But observe, that if to think, to 
perceive, to have intelligence, to enjoy and use the 
power of conscious thought, — if this be to have 
personality, — then when we say that Almighty God 
is a person, we mean that He is one w r ho thinks and 
knows and perceives, not merely as we do, but far 
more perfectly in every respect ; who has conscious- 
ness, but a consciousness so full that ours compared 
to His is less than the vague perception of infancy 
as compared to the luminous vision of manhood ; 



68 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF ALMIGHTY GOD. 

who thinks, hut with a power and range and scope 
of thought so great that our thoughts are, in com- 
parison to His, what folly is to wisdom ; who has, 
forever and essentially, every personal quality and 
attribute which we can trace in ourselves, and by 
which we establish our difference from mere inani- 
mate things, but in infinite perfection. Personality 
has many degrees. The lower a creature may be, 
or the higher, in the scale of life, the narrower, or 
the fuller will be the attribute in question. A stone, 
a tree, a hill, a river, the clouds, the elements, the 
mechanical and chemical forces, — these are in no 
sense personal beings. But all animals have per- 
sonality; all that have the power of motion, together 
with a will ; all that are conscious of pleasure, of 
pain, of want ; all that have a logical faculty: all 
these are persons. Above the rest stands man, — 
above and far heyond the rest in this endowment. 
But God is greater still. In Him this quality of 
personal existence is found in final and supreme per- 
fection. Settle it in your minds what you will un- 
derstand by the term, and then add to it an infinity 
of excellence : God is all that you have thought of, 
and infinitely more. 

And, secondly, Almighty God, as Christianity pro- 
claims Him, is one who is distinct from all the works 
of His hands. In His substance He is eternal; and 
there is no eternal substance besides. And not at 
any time, or in any manner, hath aught of that di- 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF ALMIGHTY GOD. 69 

vine and eternal substance been communicated to 
any creature. It cannot be shared with creatures. 
It cannot be parted among creatures. It cannot 
flow aw r ay into works or forms. It is the indivisi- 
ble, the inseparable, the essential nature and sub- 
stance of Almighty God. He cannot be divided, 
nor cut up into parts, nor transformed, now into 
one shape, and anon into another ; for He is from 
eternity to eternity the same. He made all things. 
But He made nothing out of His own substance as 
out of a material ; to assert that would be sheer 
blasphemy. He made, at first, and by His omnipo- 
tent word brought into being, a material which had 
no existence before ; this He created before aught 
else, and of this He made and framed the worlds. 
But that substance, that building-material, was not 
Himself. It was brought into being in time, by 
Him who is eternal. It was not, in any wise, until 
He caused it to be. And thus the universe, which 
was made of material not previously existing, is 
infinitely distinct from God. No part of His sub- 
stance hath ever passed over, or flowed into, or be- 
come amalgamated with the world, or with any por- 
tion thereof. There is not, as Pantheism says, one 
universal substance. The substance of things creat- 
ed is finite, limited, temporary, contingent, variable ; 
the infinite and eternal substance is, in one word, 
God. There it is that Pantheism and Christianity 
part. The philosophic system confounds God and 



70 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF ALMIGHTY GOD. 

nature. The holy faith divides them by the differ- 
ence of infinity.* 

The old philosophers agreed not together as to the 
manner in which God and the world were one. It 
will repay us to consider, in passing, their wild the- 
ories; for the statement of those theories will bring 
more clearly to light the Catholic faith. They all 
held the view that God and the world were of 
one and the same substance ; but they had four 
different forms of the common theory, and they used 
the words generation, emanation, limitation, and ani- 
mation, as descriptive terms to mark the different 
shades of their thoughts. Some of them said that 
God made the world out of His own substance, as the 
parent begets the child of his own blood ; and this 
was the theory of generation. Others again sup- 
posed that all the creation has come forth from God, 
just as light from the sun, or heat from flame, or 
vapor from water ; and this was the theory of em- 
anation. A third class considered that visible ob- 
jects are but a modification, or a series of modifica- 
tions, of a substance which never changes; and they 
held that the universe is made of God, just as seas, 
gulfs, bays, and straits are formed of the same vast 
ocean, in the indentations of enclosing shores ; and 
this was the theory of limitation. And, finally, 
there were those who thought that God was inside 
of the universe and mixed up with it, a kind of 

* See Note F. 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF ALMIGHTY GOD. *J1 

soul, making everything alive and keeping it fresh 
and sound, as the soul preserves the body in man ; 
and this was the theory of animation. 

But all these views are false together, for one and 
the same falsehood lies in them all, and back of them 
all, — that falsehood about the identity of substance.* 
Which falsehood is met in the statement of the 
Catholic faith, that God and the works of God are 
infinitely distinct. They are not the same. He is 
not a part of the universe ; nor is the universe a 
part of Him. He made all things ; but that where- 
with He wrought, and whereof He made them, was 
not before : it was created ; it was not eternal. 
None is eternal but He ; and no substance is eternal 
but His. And since the world is not eternal, there- 
fore it was not of His substance that the world was 
made. 

But in our holy religion, beloved brethren, there 
is nothing one-sided, nothing incomplete. The mind 
of the Church, as shown in her Creed and confes- 
sions, is large and wide as the mind of the Spirit 
and of the Holy Ghost. And, therefore, while we 
are taught that Almighty God is infinitely distinct 
from the universe, we must at the same time hold 
fast the truth that He is most closely, most inti- 
mately connected with it. For these articles of our 
faith do act towards each other unto compensation ; 
either would be unsatisfying without the other, while 
* See Note G. 



72 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF ALMIGHTY GOD. 

both together leave nothing to be desired. Almighty 
God is not distant from that world which He has 
been pleased to call into being ; on the contrary, He 
is exceeding near. Nowhere is He the same as the 
world ; yet nowhere is He absent from it. These 
two are essential truths. There can be no religion, 
in the proper sense of the term, where they are not 
confessed. His entire distinction from the universe, 
and His closest union with it, — of these two points 
must men be convinced, as indispensable conditions 
to true belief and healthful thought. 

But how shall we harmonize statements which 
appear to conflict 1 By referring one of them to 
the divine substance, and the other to the divine per- 
sonality. As to His nature, Almighty God is in- 
finitely distinct from the works of His hands; but as 
to His personal attributes, He is inseparably united 
to them. In His power, in His vision, in His will, 
in His thought, in His sympathies, in His love, 
He is nowhere far off, he is never absent. No oc- 
currence can take place without His knowledge. No 
creature can exist but by His command. No point 
in all the universe can, though but for an instant, be 
hidden from His sight. He knows all, He sees all, 
He thinks of all, He feels for all, He loves all. He 
is everywhere, as to His thought, His power, His 
goodness. And yet, nowhere is there the least ap- 
proach to confusion or commingling of substance. 
These are the two grand truths on which our whole 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF ALMIGHTY GOD. ^3 

religion is built, and in which all our hopes reside. 
You cannot deny either without risking the loss of 
all that we have most precious. For to deny the 
former, and to say that God and the universe are 
not absolutely distinct, as to essence and substance, 
is to admit the pantheistic tenet of unity of sub- 
stance, with all the woe, and all the horror, and all 
the hopelessness which we have seen to result from 
that monstrous assumption. While, on the other 
hand, to deny the second article of the faith, and to 
say that God and the world are not most intimately 
connected, is to reject the sweet truth that we have 
a Father in heaven, and the consolatory assurance 
that a wise and thoughtful Providence overrules the 
course of affairs ; it is to separate God from His 
creation and from man ; it is to suppose in Him a 
being without sympathy and without care ; to regard 
the world as a system blindly led along by fate or 
chance or unimpassioned law ; to consider the human 
race as beings without a father, a governor, a guide, 
without a redeemer, a preserver, a ruler ; as having 
no one to pray to, and no one to trust to, and no one 
to account to, nor any to encourage, to sustain, to 
reward. These are the results of denial of either 
of those cardinal truths ; Pantheism threatens on 
the one side, Atheism on the other. And, to avoid 
those extremes, we must, from the heart, embrace, 
and ever hold fast, and ever firmly profess, the two 
sister truths, that Almighty God, as to His eternal, 



74 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF ALMIGHTY GOD. 

His essential, His incommunicable substance, is in- 
finitely and absolutely distinct from His creation and 
from the whole frame of the vast universe ; and 
that the same Almighty God, as to His personal 
life, His power, His will, His thought, His love, His 
providence, His knowledge, His vision, is everywhere 
present, and everywhere most intimately connected 
with that same creation, with every creature, and 
with everything, and with every part of that same 
universe. These two affirmations are the columns 
which hold up the sacred temple of the faith. Take 
either of them away, and the edifice topples to its 
utter destruction ; and if it so go down, it must drag 
the whole social system into the chasm. 

There remains but one more of those statements, 
to the unfolding of which this lecture was set apart. 
Fourthly, therefore, Almighty God must be thought 
of by us as a being who cannot alter or change. 
You remember what horrid blasphemy the pantheist 
has uttered in respect of progress, and development, 
and improvement in God, meaning, by God, that 
eternal substance of which he wildly dreams. But 
the God of Christianity and of the gospel is not 
that image which the philosophers have set up. He 
is one in whom there can be no variableness, neither 
shadow of turning. From eternity to eternity He 
abides the same. God is the same in two respects: 
first, as regards His essential being, in which no 
alteration can occur ; and secondly, as regards our 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF ALMIGHTY GOD. ^5 

thoughts and conceptions of Him, which cannot in 
the least degree affect His positive reality. In de- 
claring that unchangeableness, therefore, we intend 
that double reference; we mean to say, not only that 
He is evermore the same God, yesterday, and to-day, 
and forever, but also, that His independence of any 
cogitations of ours concerning Him could by no pos- 
sibility be more complete. All this is expressed in 
that sublimest name that ever was uttered or con- 
ceived, that name which He announced as His own, 
Ego sum qui sum : " I am that I am" What mar- 
vellous pow r er, what inflexibility of strength, what 
calm majesty in that title : " I am that I am ! " The 
same, the unchanging, the Lord, from age to age. 
Not, " I am whatsoever you think me to be;" not, 
" I am this to one man and that to another ; " not, 
" I am to you whatever you prefer that I should be, 
whatever you, as you follow your self-willed thoughts, 
consider that I ought to be, and feel confident that I 
must be ; but, I am that I am ! I am He that was 
from eternity, and is now, and is to come. I am 
He that hath no dependence on the world, nor any 
need of man ; that taketh not counsel of creatures, 
neither hath learned from them the path of judg- 
ment. I am the first and the last. The Creator. 
The Father. The Provident Ruler. The Maker 
of man, the Redeemer of man, the Sanctifier of man. 
Your Lord, your Re warder, your Judge. O chil- 
dren of men, what avail your thoughts that ye 



76 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF ALMIGHTY GOD. 

should think by them to affect the absolute truth of 
My being? How can ye dream this wild thing, 
that I should change with any and with every im- 
agination of your minds concerning Me ? Can there 
be named in all the range of human delusions one 
so huge as this, that any man should suppose that 
God is whatever he imagines God to be X Can there 
be told, of all the duties of man, one more necessary 
than this, that he hold fast his belief in the absolute 
perfection, in the entire self-sufficiency, of his Crea- 
tor ? I am that I am. Judge not of Me by any 
rule of your own, but judge by what I have de- 
clared. Hear not men, but listen to My eternal 
word. My Son, the only begotten, He hath de- 
clared Me. Hear ye Him. For He only hath the 
words of life. Learn of Him My great and glorious 
name, — the name of one who is immutable, unalter- 
able, beyond the reach of any and all agencies, in 
the perfection of My eternal state and nature." 

Thus, beloved brethren, has the attempt been made 
to set forth to you the Christian idea of God ; or 
rather, to speak of God, not as men have thought 
Him to be, but as in truth He is. You have heard 
the declarations of the Church to all mankind, in 
this behalf : — 

First, that He is really a personal being, like 
ourselves. 

Secondly, that He is in no way confused or com- 
mingled with the works of His hands, but infinitely 
distinct from them. 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF ALMIGHTY GOD. JJ 

Thirdly, that He is most intimately connected with 
the world and with all its inhabitants, with all that 
therein is. 

Fourthly, that He is what He is, positively and 
absolutely, whatever our views or opinions concern- 
ing Him may be. 

Take these first principles of our holy religion 
as tests, amid the vagueness of modern thought. 
Make these great truths the starting-point of your 
faith, and the boundaries of every imagination of 
your spirits concerning the Most High. When you 
are presented with the theory of a God who has 
evidently been fashioned and shaped by the subtle 
wit of man to suit its own preconceptions, know 
that this idea is a mere idol, and reject and denounce 
it as a travesty of that high and lofty One whose 
sublime existence is independent of aught beyond 
itself. When you hear men talk of a God who 
cares not for this world, nor for us, nor for our af- 
fairs, — of a God who is supposed to have resigned 
to arbitrary and unthinking law the order and direc- 
tion of the course of this world, — reject that low 
conception as an utter misrepresentation, as a shame- 
less parody of Him by whom the very hairs of our 
heads are all numbered ; without whom not even a 
sparrow falleth to the ground ; whose eye, whose 
love, whose providence, whose power, are every- 
where, searching the darkness and the light, and 
never failing, in any instant of time, nor at any 



78 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF ALMIGHTY GOD. 

point of the immeasurable universe. As for a God 
who is substantially one with his creatures; or 
who dwells afar, careless of our concerns ; or who 
is destitute of thought, or sight, or consciousness ; 
who can work no miracle, who can speak no word 
to our bodily ears, who cannot show Himself to our 
bodily vision : there is no such being, save in the 
brains of the deceiver and the deceived. The real 
God is indeed a reality ; the God with whom we 
have to do is not a creature of our minds, but the 
sovereign Lord of heaven and earth. It is He that 
made the world and all things therein ; who giveth 
to all life and breath and all things ; who hath made 
of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all 
the face of the earth, and hath determined the times 
before appointed and the bounds of their habitations; 
who is not far from every one of us. This is the God 
whom Paul preached, when he stood on Mars' Hill, 
face to face with the epicureans and the stoics of an- 
cient time. This is the God whom we must preach 
face to face with the spiritualists, the transcenden- 
talists, the philosophers of modern days. Nor doubt 
the triumph of the faith in Him. Though these 
false priests build up their altar of abomination, and 
fashion their god and set him up thereon ; though 
they substitute the worship of a rationalistic deity 
for the old, the only hope of all the ends of the 
earth ; though they cry from morning even till noon, 
"■0 Baal, hear us!" though antichrist be thus re- 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF ALMIGHTY GOD. 79 

vealed as the latter days come nigh ; and though this 
false deity at length appear sitting in the temple of 
God, and showing himself that he is God, even in 
the temple of the deluded heart and mind which de- 
ifies its own opinion and bows before it : yet wait, 
brethren, till the time of the evening sacrifice, till 
the altars be rebuilt, till the true God appear in 
glory for the salvation of His people ; and then the 
dream shall be over and the spell broken, and there 
shall be heard a sound, as it were the voice of great 
multitudes and of many waters; and as that awful 
sound takes shape and volume, it shall ascend far to 
the pealing dome above, proclaiming, " The Lord, 
He is the God ! The Lord, He is the God ! " 



80 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 



LECTURE VI. 

THE CHRISTIAN FAITH IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 

In the preceding- lecture there was set forth, 
though briefly and imperfectly, the true Catholic 
faith concerning the existence and attributes of Al- 
mighty God* It now remains to draw our remarks 
to a close. We have passed together through those 
places in which, as in a synagogue of Satan, strange 
doctrines are taught; we have heard the sound of 
other systems ; we have measured the length of 
their separation from the everlasting truth, and have 
gauged the depth of that abyss into which they are 
capable of casting down the mind of him who yields 
to their solicitations. Emerging at length from 
those forbidding regions of profane speculation, we 
have considered in a general way, and with a view 
to comparison, the leading principles of the Chris- 
tian faith concerning Almighty God. It is now 
proposed, by way of a suitable conclusion of the 
work, to dwell upon the idea of Him as that idea 
is presented to us in the Church, and to show its 
practical application in the order of our daily life. 

How clear is that idea, and how full ! how plain 



THE CHRISTIAN FAITH IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 81 

and accessible to the grasp of faith ! how capable of 
meeting all spiritual requirement and necessity ! A 
home-like presence, a familiar neighborhood, a close 
and true and real relationship. " What shall a man 
give in exchange for his soul I " saith the Lord. 
But of Him, and of the Father, may we exclaim, 
using and applying His words, " What shall a man 
give in exchange for his God ] " Surely, if be- 
reaved of our simple faith in God, — the Father, the 
Son, the Holy Ghost, — we could never rest content 
with any of those loose and vague conceptions to 
which the holy name has been applied. The phan- 
tom raised by Philosophy, the shadow evoked by 
that witchcraft of the subtle understanding, by that 
magic of the godless imagination, — this phantom, 
this shadow, is not that in which we have trusted, 
nor is it He whom we do know. 

Perhaps the readiest way of learning how pre- 
cious, how satisfying is the idea of God, as He 
hath revealed Himself to us through the Gospel, 
would be to reflect how much and what we should 
lose if that idea were lost, — how much of our daily 
life must go, if that idea were gone. 

Imagine, therefore, a state of things which may 
perhaps arrive before the end of the world ; and 
suppose that the belief in the Holy Trinity, the 
God of Christianity, had become, for the most part, 
extinct in the breasts of men. And suppose that 
in its place there had become established (if aught 
6 



82 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 

so shapeless and anomalous can be spoken of as 
established) the theory of a Universal-Substance- 
Deity, and the idea of a self-development in that 
substance as the only mode of life and advance, and 
as the only assignable reason or explanation of 
things as they occur and are. And, furthermore, 
suppose some man, who should be the survivor 
from a former age of faith, — one who had believed 
once, but afterwards resigned and renounced his 
earlier thoughts, — a man who, once a Christian, had 
outlived his better days, to stand at last avowed a 
philosophizer and a rationalist. To what should 
such a man look back] And, as comparing his 
former with his later self, what should he have 
lost, and to what extent would his intelligent and 
conscious existence have been affected by the 
change 1 Let us reflect. 

And first, to speak of his personal and individual 
life. From that sphere all idea of a Father, a Pro- 
tector, a Guide, a Friend, would have utterly faded 
away. The God of Pantheism is not a Providence 
over us : it has no thought, no heart, no love, no 
power. All those conceptions, therefore, in respect 
to the Deity, would have become extinct in the 
mind of the man whose case we are considering. 
In the morning light, as he opened his eyes to it, 
there would be no sign of a Divine Protection, re- 
newing the days of his life ; and though the sun 
arose never so brightly in the splendors of the east, 



THE CHRISTIAN FAITH IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 83 

there would be no logical ground for thankfulness 
towards any Ruler of the Universe, for the gift of 
that warm and clear shining. So, too, the song 
of nature, reviving at the dawn and in the beams 
of the new day, must be no longer interpreted as 
if it were a hymn of praise ; but the crowing of 
the cock, the matins of birds, the hum of joyous 
life, all breaking forth together in full concert, must 
be accounted but a series of fatalistic occurrences, 
and not the response of a glad creation to that be- 
neficent Creator from whom it all hath birth. Our 
Father would have been banished from the dawn 
and early morning hour, and what was once, and 
is now, to Christian ears, a cheerful anthem of 
praise in which it becomes man to bear his part by 
devotion, thanksgiving, and prayer, would change 
to a medley of sounds, without a purpose and with- 
out an object. But again : this philosopher-relig- 
ionist must go forth to the duties of the day, — 
nay, not to the duties^ there can be no such thing, 
for where there is no relationship there can be 
no duty, — he must go forth to his work, with no 
sense of One who shall work with him ; with no 
invocation of a blessing from any quarter, for there 
can be no blessing where there is none to speak it. 
And so, through the twelve hours of the day, he 
would pursue his course, so far as any power above 
him might be regarded, alone. No eye to watch, 
no ear to hear, no hand to show the path ; not one 



84 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 



in heaven to care for, to mark, to approve, to re- 
gard. To his view those heavens must be utterly 
empty : no angels there, no throne high and lifted 
up, no paradise, no happy souls in light; nought 
but a great concavity of self-forming, self-develop- 
ing material, cold as the ice, pitiless as winter, 
empty as his own heart. Thus going through the 
day in solitude, he is overtaken at last by the fall 
of night ; and the night, so falling on that barren 
day, is the fit and true symbol of the darkness of 
a universe without a God distinct from itself. 

Such must be, to the man whose position we 
are tracing in imagination, the experience of any 
common day of his life, when days run smoothly 
by. But days do not always keep that even, meas- 
ured beat. There are emergencies in life, times 
of crisis, of doubtfulness, of sorrow. There are 
days when a man needs counsel, and days when 
he needs consolation. But with the recession of a 
faith such as Christianity bestows, the Comforter 
retires and the Counsellor departs away. So he 
must find that all those fountains of wisdom at 
which men have been wont to drink are dried, 
and that all the springs of relief are frozen at the 
source. In the Substance-Deity of Pantheism 
there is no personality, and therefore there can be 
no care, no compassion, no knowledge of our grief. 
To look to that shapeless and anomalous mass for 
any sympathy with suffering man, would be vainer 



THE CHRISTIAN FAITH IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 85 

than to talk to the electric fluid, or to invoke the 
vaporous drift of the open sea. Where tears fell 
fast as rain, they must continue to fall unregarded. 
Where sorrow bowed herself, scarce half-alive, upon 
the face or the relics of the loved and lost, there 
would she be suffered to stay, and there to harden 
to insensibility or sink in absolute despair. In 
time of doubt, no Counsellor; in time of trouble, 
no Comforter ; nor any explanation of the riddles 
of life, nor any alleviation for its distresses. No 
sense of duty to constrain the rich ; no trustful 
faith, no devout resignation, to mitigate the adverse 
lot of the poor. And so — to pass from private 
affairs to those of a wider range — the common, 
social life must remain in a state of confusion as 
thorough as that of the individual career, so far as 
any explanation of its course and intent and object 
are concerned. As for history, the man who has 
lost his creed and his faith must also give that up 
forever. Regarded as an intelligent solution of 
successive events, history would no longer exist. 
The world must be regarded as moving on without 
superintendence : no thought could be less reason- 
able, on this hypothesis, than that of an intelligent 
agent distinct from the world observing the drift 
of human affairs, and carrying on good and grand 
designs through the chances and changes of life. 
Thus, with the loss of the true faith, and upon the 
substitution for it of the weak philosophy and the 



86 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 

vain traditions of men, there must ensue a gradual 
but sure disappearance of Almighty God. He 
withdraws from the life of the individual, from the 
life of the community, from the life of the nation, 
from the life of human kind. He ceases, He de- 
parts, and men are left alone. No thought, no 
care, no heart, no love, beyond ourselves. No law, 
no duty, no crime, no good, no evil. No aim in 
life, no joy, no hope for the future. No one to be 
grateful to, none to fear, none to offend. No bless- 
ing to ask, no curse to escape. No reward in toil, 
no fruit in labor ; no hand to dry the tears, no ear 
to hear the prayer. No mission for nations, no 
honor for states, no object for citizens. No pious 
dedication of the infant, no creed to teach the child, 
no blessing of strength and grace for the youth. 
No divine sanction for the marriage relation, no 
obligations for hearth and home. No worship for 
the living, no sacraments, no intercession for the 
sick, and for the dead no psalm of life and immor- 
tality. No grace to say over the daily bread, no 
invocation ere we lay us down to sleep, no word of 
thanks for the dawn of another day. All gone. 
All that speaks of God, — all that implies God, — 
all that breathes of Him, or refers to Him, or de- 
rives its signification from Him, — all gone forever, 
like a dissolving dream. No Father, no personal 
Friend, no providential Guide, no Wonder-worker, 
no Inspirer and Hearer of prayer : all lost at 






THE CHRISTIAN FAITH IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 87 

once, with the loss of faith in a God distinct from 
the world, yet near to us ; a spirit, yet personally 
like ourselves ; Himself unchanging, and near to 
us all, as Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier, — as the 
most august, the most complete of all existences, — 
even as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. 

Alas ! my brethren, where should we be left with 
all this gone ? And what would that be worth to 
us which yet remained ] Go it must, — ■ all this to 
which we have held fast, all this in which we have 
trusted, — if philosophy should supplant faith. 
There is no faith, save one, — the faith in the Most 
High and undivided Trinity, " One Lord, One 
Faith, One Baptism, One God and Father of all, 
who is above all, and through all, and in as all" 
To Him, as to our stronghold, let us turn, and let 
us cling with firmer grasp to our traditional belief 
in Him. God is no stranger here ; and what we 
hold and profess concerning Him is no uncertain 
theory, no doubtful and hesitating experiment. We 
know Him well ; we know Him as we know each 
other. It is He that hath made us, and not we 
ourselves ; that hath made us of the dust, that hath 
fashioned us as the potter mouldeth the clay, so as 
that we are no part of Himself, albeit He is not 
far from every one of us, albeit He is through all, 
and in us all. But He who created us, and in 
whom we live and move and have our being, knows 
us, and observes, and has intimate and familiar ac- 



88 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 

quaintance with everything about us, from first to 
last. There is no human knowledge to be com- 
pared with His in fulness ; there is no discernment 
to be named in the same breath with His for pre- 
cision. His thought embraces us and all our con- 
cerns, and His eye follows and investigates our 
every step. He, moreover, is our true home, — the 
One for whom we were made, — He whose glory is 
the end of our existence, and without whom the 
nations are as nothing, yea, less than nothing and 
vanity. All our strength is in Him, and from 
Him is all our hope. When He thought good so 
to do, He created us. And when we had fallen 
He redeemed us. And now that He has made us 
His own, He sanctifieth us. There is nothing upon 
earth so sure as the hallowed round of doctrine, 
truth, and usage, know T n as His revelation. It is 
all authentic ; it cannot change or fail. While the 
statute books of nations have become antiquated 
and obsolete, the Holy Scriptures remain ever fresh 
and ever new. While the nations perish and cease, 
the Church still stands and renews her youth ; for 
God is in the midst of her, therefore shall she not 
be removed. He is no vague dream, no impersonal 
substance. It was His Son, eternal like Himself, 
who dwelt here among us, and was called Jesus 
Christ ; it was He who was nailed, in ancient time, 
upon a cross, and who died thereon ; it was He 
that was buried, that rose again of a Sunday 



THE CHRISTIAN FAITH IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 89 

morning in the sweet spring-time, and afterwards 
ascended to heaven. In the Redeemer of men 
there was, of course, a personality as perfect and 
complete as there can be in men themselves ; and 
that personality was the same which was from the 
beginning, is now, and ever shall be, the person of 
the eternal Son of God, eternal as to all the past, 
eternal as to the future. This is He whom we 
have believed. And while we recognize Him, hour 
by hour, in this mortal life, as, with the Father and 
the Holy Ghost, its Author, its Ruler, its Sus- 
tainer ; so does this recognition ascend to a higher 
pitch of marvel and joy than any tongue could avail 
to express, when we contemplate the wonder of our 
redemption. For us He died ; for us He gave 
Himself a sacrifice ; and freely hath He thereupon 
given us all things to make that redemption avail- 
able, to make that sacrifice our acceptable ransom. 
Ours is the whole system of grace, — a system 
adapted to all people and to every place and time, 
and bespeaking the Lord God in the most ami- 
able and blessed of relationships, the Father, the 
Friend, the lover of His creatures. When we 
find comfort in the reception of the holy sacra- 
ments of the Church, it is because they are the links 
between Him and our souls. When, at the read- 
ing of His Holy Word, our hearts do burn within 
us, it is because His voice is speaking to our ears, 
because His spirit is communing with our spirits, 



90 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 

because our eyes are fastened on the very syllables 
which His good hand hath penned. When, in the 
sanctity of the first day of the week, there comes 
refreshment to the weary spirits and bodies of those 
who then may rest, it is because that day is the 
everlasting* prophecy to man of the Sabbath of 
God's eternity. When, seeking the calm shelter 
of the house of prayer, we forget, for a space, the 
din of the world, it is because we feel that He is 
there with whom it is good for man to be alone. 
The relief of confession of sin ; the sweetness of 
acts of penitential discipline ; the strength which 
slides down from above into the soul and spirit, in 
answer to humble, persevering prayer ; the conscious 
joy in acts of mercy and love; all these, and the 
hundred more of such like emotions, are what 
they are, simply because God is what He is, and be- 
cause we believe what He has told us of Himself, 
and because we know that He saith true. Ours, 
then, in so far as we are Christians, is the undying 
confidence in Him which alone can support us in 
all dangers, and carry us through all temptations, 
the realization of His presence, the experience of 
His power, the thrilling, sensitive response to the 
calls of His Holy Spirit, the trust in His strength, 
the veneration for His wisdom, the rejoicing ac- 
quiescence in His will. We make of Him an ac- 
quaintance, we picture Him to ourselves as a friend, 
we think of Him as of a neighbor ; in Christ, He is 



THE CHRISTIAN FAITH IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 91 

become to us a wise, a good, a great, a glorious, 
a perfect man. There can be no vagueness in such 
a faith in God. There can be no wavering in prin- 
ciples such as these. There can be little doubt as 
to the future, — as little as there is of mistrust in 
the present. We know our calling. We can see 
ahead a long way. We look not to the future as 
a blank. It is an ocean, over which we have not 
yet spread our sail ; but the Bible is our chart, and 
our faith is the compass, and we shall not fear as 
we launch forth. 

Beloved brethren, the words which have now 
been said respecting that future towards which we 
are hastening, recall the necessity of finding a con- 
clusion for these studies and, perhaps, rambling 
thoughts. How, then, shall the conclusion be 
made X By reflecting on the conclusion itself; on 
the conclusion of any earthly career, as it must 
appear upon the pantheistic hypothesis, or upon 
the analogy of the Christian religion. We have 
thought together of that dismal system which de- 
nies the personal God; which makes the universe 
eternal ; which views God and the universe as sub- 
stantially one ; which regards all visible things, and 
man himself, as but evolvings of the primal sub- 
stance, as but phenomena in a fated sequence of de- 
velopment. That system would be dismal when stud- 
ied at every advantage, — by a man in full health, 
and rich, and free from care and responsibility, and 



92 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 

at the hour of noontide, and amid scenes of outward 
prosperity and peace. Even then, the system would 
be almost oppressive in some yet uncomprehended 
awe and mystery of prophetic failure. How, then, 
must it appear, if all these circumstances should be 
reversed X How must these tenets sound, when 
spoken to the heart of poverty, of pain, of grief? 
How, finally, must this cup of consolation taste, 
when presented and offered to the lips of the dying \ 
Go to the man whose hour is come that he should 
depart out of this world, and speak to him, in the 
name of this philosophy, such message as it can 
convey ; and if there be a shadow darker than the 
shadow of death, these tender mercies of the pan- 
theistic creed shall pour that hopeless shadow, 
broad and still, upon his forehead and upon his 
soul. There is no light beneath that shade ; there 
can be no dawn beyond. Go to the man whose 
hour is come, and tell him that all is over forever- 
more ; that he has played his part in the fatal se- 
quence, and now must disappear eternally ; that he 
was but a portion of the absolute substance, a man- 
ifestation for a moment, an evolution, and that the 
gulf which vomited forth the atom is about to en- 
gorge it again. Tell him that his whole course 
here on earth has been but a dream ; that his con- 
sciousness was but the consciousness of a deep- 
heaving matter ; that whether that portion which 
he calls himself shall ever appear again in realized 



THE CHRISTIAN FAITH IN ITS APPLICATIONS. Q3 

form or conscious shape is utterly beyond the 
power of prediction ; that life and time are but 
"an everlasting shore, that tumbles in the godless 
deep ; " and that for him there now remains but 
this, — 

" To drop, head-foremost, in the jaws 
Of vacant darkness, and to cease ; " — 

tell him all this, the gospel of Pantheism, and 
then withdraw, lest the curse follow fast upon your 
footsteps from the lips of despair and death. Yet 
not, perhaps, the curse ; perhaps the blessing, — yea, 
the blessing upon you, who, in thus exhibiting the 
last resources of Philosophy, in thus revealing in 
the most critical time her utter incompetency as a 
guide or a comfort, have been the means of awak- 
ing the soul from its delusion, and breaking the 
spells of Satan, though at the eleventh hour of life. 
Many a man who, through long and hardened 
years, has had no better hope than such as this, 
at the close of all hath yet, and, let us trust, not 
too late, recoiled from the awful emptiness in the 
face of which he had dwelt, and flung himself, in 
mortal extremity, in anguish of spirit, at the throne 
of the Father, and at the feet of the Great High 
Priest. Oh what peace and joy is there in believ- 
ing! What perfect confidence in the w 7 ill and 
power of the Christian's Saviour, of the Christian's 
God ! And what calm triumph, in the final hour, 
over any and all fears of death ! " Preciosa in 



91 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 

conspectu Domini mors sanctorum ejus : " Precious 
in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints. 
For them, the past life is a dear, a sweet reality : 
for there they walked with Him ; there had they 
experience of His power ; there they learned to love 
Him, and there they were made ready by grace for 
all that is to come. Dear are the friends they met ; 
dear those whom they leave ; nor is the parting 
over-sorrowful for nature to support, since presently 
they that are Christ's shall meet again. And if the 
past be real, (Oh very real and very sweet that past 
of a Christian life !) what shall be said of the fu- 
ture % No " vacant darkness " there, but the full 
and w r arm light of paradise. No awful emptiness, 
but the house of many mansions resounding eter- 
nally with the voice of joy. The Father's house, — 
the doors therein open, the pathway thither paved 
with pure gold, and the angels of Heaven descend- 
ing and ascending thereon ! The Lord, standing 
above, proclaiming to all salvation, and unto all 
peace. The children thronging thither to the feast 
of eternal days. This is the vision of holy death. 
All fear cast out in perfect love; all doubt dis- 
missed in the filial confidence of the heart. Then 
the comfort of the Holy Communion, the body and 
blood of the Lord ; the refreshment of prayer ; 
the hopeful " farewell," being but for a little time ; 
the commendation of the soul, made by the min- 
ister of the gospel of Christ. And then the still- 



THE CHRISTIAN FAITH IN ITS APPLICATIONS. 95 

ness,— the stillness which is such on our side alone ; 
which, on the other, is no stillness, but the blend- 
ing together of the praises of the rejoicing hosts on 
high. And then the temporary sleep of the body- 
in the care of our Lord, who is the Resurrection 
and the Life.* 

O Father, Son, and Holy Ghost ! high and 
undivided Trinity ! To Thee, God in Three Per- 
sons, be ascribed all glory and praise ! To Thee, 
O Father, do we owe all praise, for that Thou hast 
made us ! To Thee, O Son, do we owe all praise, 
for that Thou, when we were dead, didst make us 
to live again ! To Thee, O Holy Spirit, do we owe 
all praise, for that Thou dost convert us, and renew 
us day by day ! In that great name standeth ever- 
more the hope of the world ; in that great name 
standeth our eternal life. And long after the proph- 
ecies have failed, and the tongues have ceased, and 
the knowledge hath vanished away, shall be pro- 
claimed, yea, forever and forevermore, 

" Lo ! this is our God ! We have waited for 
Him, and He will save us : this is the Lord ; we 
have waited for Him, we will be glad and rejoice in 
His salvation." 

* See Note H. 



NOTES- 



NOTE A. 

Mr. Herbert Spencer's work on " Universal Progress," 
lately reprinted in this country, has appeared since these 
lectures were written. I could not have desired a fuller 
illustration than that which it affords of the tone and results 
of modern rationalistic thought. The term which best de- 
scribes his system is " Mechanical Atheism." It is the ne- 
gation of a divine mind and will, and the explanation of the 
origin and government or course of the world by matter and 
movement, by purely mechanical laws, and by the blind 
forces of nature. The pantheistic ideas of emanation and de- 
velopment appear in startling rigidity; the dogma of the 
creation is contemptuously flouted ; Christianity is accounted 
for as a mere phase of feeling ; and every vestige of religion, 
as we understand it, vanishes. Lest these expressions should 
seem too strong, I quote from a recent review of the work 
by a writer not known to me, in order that my opinion may 
be justified : — 

" ' Universal Progress ' is the title selected by the author 
.... by universal progress he means a law of evolution 
common to all beings and all phenomena, whether mate- 
rial or spiritual. Many even of the so-called powers and 
forces of nature are developed by new combinations and con- 
ditions that have gone before .... the same doctrine is 
applied to what we call mental powers. These are only 
new and higher manifestations of what are usually called 
the vital forces, when brought into activity under favoring 
physical conditions ; and these vital forces are but similar 



98 NOTES. 

developments of chemical and mechanical powers, under 
their appropriate excitants, when interposed at the proper 
juncture." 

No one can mistake the meaning of this who knows the 
history of the pantheistic philosophy. Let us hear the re- 
sults of this " Universal Progress " theory in its applications 
to the grand and supreme questions of God, man, the soul, 
time, and eternity : — 

"Of the object of religious worship Mr. Spencer says 
little more than we have hinted. In his ' First Principles,' 
he furnishes an elaborate argument, derived from his philos- 
ophy, to show that there is a one mysterious something, a 
somewhat, the object of worship, whose being is manifested 
in the universe, but whose nature and relations are utterly 
unknown and unknowable. His nature is unknown, because 
the nature of everything great or small is unknown, and is a 
mystery. His relations are unknowable, because that such 
a being should have relations is impossible from his very 
nature as absolute and unrelated. That there is such a 
being we know ; but who or what he is we do not know, 
nor can we ever learn. Like time, space, force, and mo- 
tion, he is ; but what he is cannot be conceived by human 
thought. The apotheosis of his system is, to set apart and 
consecrate the universe as an altar ' to the unknown God,' 
whom all men must worship, but all alike ' ignorantly, ' — 
whom, therefore, no man can conceive or " declare " to another. 
Before this altar each successive generation must prostrate 
itself in blind devotion, evolving for itself a form of creed 
and worship which the next generation must inevitably 
abandon and outgrow." 

Such are the results of the latest theory of rationalism, — 
late in time, but in substance identical with the systems of 
the old pagan schools. I spoke of this scheme as " Atheism." 
But it is worse than Atheism in this, that, while it removes 
the true God from view, it does not leave the place empty, 
but puts in it a shadow and spectre of its own exorcising, — 






NOTES. 99 

a thing which means nothing, and serves no purpose except to 
deceive the minds of the ignorant. In the name of all that 
is fair and manly, we protest against this dissimulation ; and 
we affirm that if these men were honest they would say at 
once what they really think, "There is no God." But 
they cannot say that, because such a declaration would kill 
their cause. Reason and revelation agree entirely in their 
estimate of the man who takes that position, — " Dixit insip- 
iens in corde suo, non est Deus" — and therefore our phi- 
losophers are wary, and feign this veneration for a " some- 
what," to which they apply the sacred name, lest the people 
should call them fools. 



NOTE B. 

Historical Sketch of Pantheism. 

For the satisfaction of those who would pursue the subject 
&6 careful students, I present a brief outline of the history of 
this great system. 

It offers itself to us under two aspects, that of a religious 
dogma, and that of a speculative philosophy. The latter is 
a development of the former. As a dogma it appears in the 
religions of the ancient world ; as a speculation it is domi- 
nant among the philosophies of later days. Under each as- 
pect it has been the persistent adversary of revelation : in 
antiquity it filled, or tried to fill, the void left by the loss or 
defacement of the primitive tradition ; while in modern times 
it has constantly opposed the religion of Christ. 

Beginning with the earliest days, we find this heresy in 
India. The system of emanation, as opposed to the idea of 
creation, is the fundamental principle in the Indian theology. 
Brahma is not a creator, but all things emanated from him. 
The theological system of the Brahmins represents the 
universe as evolved from Brahma, and as reentering into him 
again ; he is the first and infinite substance, the cosmic 



100 NOTES. 

unity, and in the creation and destruction of successive 
worlds consist his life and death. (See the Vedas, and the 
Code of Manou.) 

In the theology of Egypt we find the same idea of ema- 
nation, and we miss that of creation proper. (The student 
may refer to Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Plutarch, Iam- 
blichus, and Porphyry.) 

From the Indian and Egyptian systems, thus standing 
first, and exhibiting the pantheistic ideas in their more rigid 
form, we pass to those of Chaldaea and Persia, which ex- 
hibit modifications of the former principle. 

In Chaldaea, dualism appears, a supreme deity being rec- 
ognized, and, at the same time, an eternal, incorruptible, and 
uncreate matter. 

In Persia the same dualistic idea presents itself, but the 
two principles are regarded as in antagonism : Ormuzd and 
Ahriman strive for the mastery amid ill-defined relationships. 

We pass, in our survey, to the Greek religions. The sub- 
ject is undoubtedly an obscure and mysterious one ; and yet 
the old Orphic doctrines seem to be but a reproduction of 
the theory of emanation. But the older religious ideas, 
whatever they may have been, were lost in the materialism 
and humanitarianism which absorbed everything ; and when 
St. Paul preached at Athens, it is evident that the idea of 
a God who created the world, and who governs it by His 
providential power, was lost to that generation. 

The school of Thales was founded on the idea of a dual- 
istic cosmogony, like that of the Phoenician and Chaldaean 
systems ; while that of Pythagoras started with the theory 
of emanation, and, running through the common course of 
pantheistic principles, attained its full development in Ti- 
maeus of Locris and Ocellus of Lucania. 

The Pythagoreans set out with the idea that all existences 
are included in the Absolute Unity. Their teachings on the 
subject of the production of things are indistinct ; or, if they 
teach at all, they seem to teach the system of emanation. 



NOTES. 101 

Xenophanes took up the question of the production of 
things, and, beginning with the denial of a creation ex nihilo, 
concluded that the universe is eternal, that there is but one 
substance, and that thought is the only immutable reality. 

Parmenides adopted this principle, and pushed it into pure 
idealism, denying any reality to the finite, and saying that 
all things that we see are but an outward show, that there 
is no reality in phenomena, and that the testimony of the 
senses is but a delusion ; he also maintained that thought 
and the object of thought are identical. 

From this extravagant idealism a reaction occurred. Leu- 
cippus and Democritus founded the materialistic school. 

Heraclitus endeavored in vain to find a means of harmo- 
nizing the idealistic and materialistic systems of the day. 

Then followed the reign of universal skepticism. 

It was when the mind had reached that wretched position 
that Socrates appeared, and reformed philosophy by con- 
founding the sophists by his well-known mode of common- 
sense argument ; by appealing to the love of truth and vir- 
tue which still remains, notwithstanding every disadvantage, 
in men ; and by leading them back toward intellectual life. 
The movement given by him led to the rise of the great 
schools of Plato, Epicurus, Aristotle, and Zeno ; and rigid 
Pantheism for a time disappeared from the scene. 

But in the school of Alexandria the old heresy revived, 
and by the Gnostics and Neo-Platonists it was formalized 
once more. 

The Gnostic philosophy had for its base the system of em- 
anation. It had two branches, a unitarian and a dualistic. 
The unitarian Gnostics held one principle, from which all 
spiritual and material substances emanated ; while the dual- 
istic Gnostics affirmed two eternal principles, spirit and mat- 
ter, of one or the other of which all beings are developments. 
The Neo-Platonists aimed at opposing Christianity and 
staying its triumphant progress, by effecting a reconciliation 
of all the philosophies and of the religious traditions of the 



102 NOTES. 

nations. It was an immense syncretism. They then pro- 
posed a theurgic system by which to place men in connec- 
tion with the gods, and to reproduce, in a purified condition, 
the beliefs and practices of the old polytheism. 

There were three chief centres of this sect, — Alexandria, 
Athens, and Rome. Its great exemplars and representative 
men are Plotinus and Proclus. These authors drew from 
the old Eastern sources ; the system of emanation forms the 
key to their whole philosophy ; and in their doctrines may 
be found the germs of the later and modern pantheistic the- 
ories. Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, the German transcenden- 
talists, and the French eclectics, have but reproduced their 
ideas. Together with their blended system of syncretistic 
speculations there came a revival of polytheism, of the prac- 
tice of magic, and of fancied communication with genii, gods, 
and departed spirits, just as, in the nineteenth century, while 
rationalistic principles have been gaining ground in the com- 
munity, the practices and arts of the table-tippers, the rap- 
pers, the spiritualists, and the dealers with the dead, have 
become familiar to the public. It is impossible to miss the 
meaning of these correspondences. 

Since the JSTeo-Platonistic school forms the connecting link 
between the ancient and the modern pantheists, it seems best 
to present the views of that school, in order that the gene- 
alogy may be clearly seen. Maret (to whose admirable and 
exhaustive work I am indebted for this historic sketch) thus 
sums up the philosophy of Proclus : — " There is only one 
substance in the universe, always identical with itself; we 
discover this essence in ourselves by the contemplation of 
the Ego. This substance is the Absolute Unity ; it encloses 
in itself the principles of multiplicity and of diversity. The 
primitive unity, like a luminous mass, radiates from its eter- 
nal centre, and produces the infinite series of beings which 
are one and manifold at once. These derived unities are 
incessantly brought back to their centre by the same force 
which flung them forth like sparks from the fire of eternal 






NOTES. 103 

life. Thus the world is perfect. Matter is an eternal em- 
anation from God. Evil is a mere negation ; it is but the 
inequality of souls." 

Thus far of the Alexandrian school. 

The triumph of Christianity brought with it a second de- 
cay and disappearance of Pantheism. It is not until the 
time of Charlemagne that we trace it again. In the ninth 
century Scotus Erigena revived it ; and other writers of less 
note exhibit in their works the predictions of its future ap- 
pearance. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, 
the study of this philosophy was fully renewed, and schools 
were formed, the pedigree of which may be traced at once 
to the Neo-Platonists. 

The appearance of Giordano Bruno and Spinoza upon the 
scene marks the commencement of the pantheistic revival. 
It is unnecessary to enter upon a full account of their tenets, 
which are already too well known. To reconcile those tenets 
with the Catholic faith would be impossible ; their relation 
with the anterior philosophies is close and full ; in principles 
and results they are the same. 

Thus, descending the chronological scale, we arrive at the 
recent epoch when Germany became the theatre of the full 
development of the traditional heresy. Kant was the father 
of the modern intellectual movement in that country. Fichte, 
Schelling, and Hegel followed in his steps, completing his 
work. In Hegel Pantheism is once more presented, pure 
and simple, to the world. The line, from the Brahmins of 
India to these rationalistic philosophers, is visible, link after 
link. The metaphysical systems of Germany are but the 
old Pantheism clad in new forms. No essential progress has 
been made. At bottom we find the same tenet of the unity 
and identity of substance, the principle which was held by 
the Pythagoreans and Neo-Platonists, revived by Erigena, 
repeated by Giordano Bruno, and made the central point in 
the system of Spinoza. 

As for ourselves, we are concerned, not so much with the 



104 



NOTES. 



system considered in its scientific form, as with its applica- 
tions. These are numerous ; as, for instance, to morals, his- 
tory, social order, art, religion. It is in these applications 
that we have to meet and deal with it ; whether it present 
itself in the shape of the historic theory of Buckle, who 
strives to trace all events to physical causes, discarding the 
idea of a superintending providence ; or in the form of the 
materialistic atheism of Spencer in his scheme of Universal 
Progress ; or in the socialistic experiments of Fourier and 
his disciples ; or in the rational religionism of those who dis- 
pense with creeds and sacraments and all the framework of 
a visible and historic Catholicism, pretending to serve God 
in individual seclusion without the mediation of rite or form 
or consecrated priesthood ; or in the dreamy and unreal 
poetry and literature of the day ; or in the feigned confer- 
ences, through mediums, with the spirits of another realm ; 
or in the mad attempts at advance and progress towards the 
idolization of humanity. It seems impossible for any candid 
man to read the history of human thought without perceiv- 
ing that one and the same disease runs through it, and that 
the course is ever in the same direction when the restraints 
provided by Almighty God are thrown away. There is and 
can be no new gospel ; it would seem that there can be no 
new heresy. These, which now assail the truth, have risen 
up against it heretofore, and have been as often prostrated. 
In like manner the reaction will presently come, and they 
shall be cast away as abominable, and left to smoulder again 
in the ashes of their burning. 



NOTE C. 

I use the word " licentious " in the sense of " unrestrained 
by law." It is strange that they who reprove lewdness in 
the flesh and in the carnal passions, seem to feel no need of 
restraining the mind from indulgence in speculation; for 



NOTES. 105 

profligacy is one and the same thing, to the eye of God, 
whether it be that of the body amid harlots, or that of the 
intellect amid profane thinkers. 

To the statement in the text that the mind gravitates nat- 
urally towards the pantheistic scheme, it may be objected 
that this is to represent the reason as tending, in its ordinary 
exercise, toward infidel solutions. But this objection is 
groundless. The reason, wrongly acting, must depart from 
the truth ; but the reason, under the conditions necessary to 
its proper exercise, cannot go astray. For the reason is but 
an eye ; and without revelation it is where the bodily eye is 
without light. It would be as great a misconception of our 
thought to say that the intellect, acting naturally, must in- 
cline to error, as to imagine us asserting that the natural use 
of the eye tends to blindness. The use of the eye under 
false conditions, as with insufficient light, or on very fine 
work, or in any way in which it w^as not intended to be 
used, would indeed tend toward the destruction of that 
organ. It is so with the reason, which, in divine and super- 
natural things, was not made to be used except under the 
illumination of the light of God. When men speculate by 
themselves, independently of that light, as shown to them in 
historic and outward revelation, they are misusing the god- 
like faculty, and do but weaken and ultimately destroy it. 



NOTE D. 

The French school of Philosophy traces its origin to Des- 
cartes ; the principles advanced by him were perfected by 
Malebranche, and it would not have been difficult, at that 
stage, to have harmonized the system with theology and re- 
ligion. 

But the sensual school of Locke took its rise in England. 
Its principles, adapted by Gassendi and Condillac, were 



106 NOTES. 

thrown into the philosophical schools of France, which 
rapidly sunk towards materialism and naturalism. 

Then came the Revolution, which upturned society, and 
shook the nation to its centre, drenching it in its own blood. 

After that social convulsion the French philosophy re- 
vived, with a powerful reaction from the materialism of its 
previous stage, — a reaction which was due to the rise and 
influence of the German schools, idealistic and spiritual in 
their tendencies. The result was seen in the establishment 
of the modern eclectic school, of which Cousin was the 
founder. 

The eclectic school denies the charge of Pantheism : it is, 
however, in its principles and results essentially pantheistic. 
A comparison of the philosophy of Hegel (about the char- 
acter of which there is no doubt) and that of the eclectics, 
will show practical results of the same character. The his- 
toric systems, the moral systems, the psychological systems 
of France have grown up together with the eclectic philoso- 
phy, and as a result of the movement and impulse which it 
gave to human thought. The tendencies of those systems 
are all in the same direction ; the breach between philosophy 
and religion is widening continually ; and the minds of the 
educated men of France at this hour would seem to be in 
almost hopeless alienation from the faith. " The longer one 
lives in this country," says a writer now resident in Paris, 
" the more deeply does one become convinced of the hopeless 
divorce between intellect and faith. The lay mind is totally 
alienated from the Church and from revealed religion. There 
is more external respect for the former, perhaps, than for the 
latter, because ' les convenances ' exercise a very arbitrary 
power in France, and it is considered correct for women and 
children to be communicants. Educated men scarcely ever 
are so ; even those who profess a kind of lax reverence for the 
Church and for religion tell you almost invariably that they 
do not ' pratiquer? " This is the recognized phrase, which 
seems to be regarded as a matter of course, an almost satis- 



NOTES. 107 

factory equivalent for the service of God. When Madame 
George Sand paints a young man, a Parisian, son of a phi- 
losopher, who is a deist like his father, and at the same time 
pure and noble in his life and feelings, she gives us, I fear, 
an ideal picture, little in accordance with the facts ; and, in- 
deed, elsewhere in the same book she shows young French- 
men as generally scoffing against humanity and moral prin- 
ciple. But she does not exaggerate the strength of the 
almost universal prejudice of the educated class against the 
Christian faith. I told you once before that one of the most 
Christian-hearted Frenchmen known to me, a literary man 
of note, told me not long ago that it was next to impossible 
for an educated Frenchman to be a Christian ; that the ut- 
most he could do was to i aspire.' " 



NOTE E. 

This idea of a progressive, advancing, and improving God, 
blasphemously as it sounds to us, is among the most familiar 
of the pantheistic notions. It is expressed in the well-known 
formula of the Germans, " Gott ist in werden" Deus est in- 
jieri. To show that the thought is not a strange one here 
at home, I make the following extracts from an article in a 
radical journal published in this city ; the communication is 
a reply to the questions, " What, Where, and How is God ? " 
The writer says : " God is the intelligent, vivifying prin- 
ciple, pervading and developing all matter Eternal 

progress is one of the attributes of God, and is the coexist- 
ent fundamental law of the universe. All nature demon- 
strates ttiis profound and all-pervading principle. God Him- 
self cannot be exceptional to the universal law of which 
Himself is the enactive and vitalizing principle. Therefore 
God Himself progresses. God possesses sensation," &c, &c. 
This writer has but copied the ideas of the German pan- 
theists. 



108 



NOTES. 



NOTE F. 

The Catholic dogma of the creation (using that word in 
its proper sense of bringing into being what was not in any 
way before) is, and must ever be, the test of all heresies 
touching the origin of the world. The philosophers repel 
the charge of Pantheism ; they claim to believe in a God. 
But they will not admit that God is a creator. If, however, 
the dogma of the creation be denied, there remains no conceiv- 
able choice but between Dualism and Pantheism. Either 
God created the world, or He did not. If He did not create 
it, it is eternal. If eternal, it is either substantially distinct 
from Him, or substantially identical with Him. To take 
the former alternative is to admit two eternal substances; 
to take the latter is to hold the unity and identity of sub- 
stance. There is no logical, no possible position for him 
who denies the Catholic dogma of the creation, save in Dual- 
ism, Pantheism, or skepticism. 



NOTE G. 

To the summary presented in the text it may be added 
that the system, as now operative, divides itself into two 
branches, materialistic Pantheism, and idealistic Pantheism. 
The former is a gross sensualism and naturalism, which sees 
in the universe nothing but matter and its modifications and 
transformations. The latter is a more elevated and more 
serious speculation. In the former, God is brought down 
to and absorbed in the world ; in the latter, the world is lifted 
up and translated into God. But the grand and distinctive 
features in each are the same, — the denial of the distinction 
between the finite and the infinite, and the assertion of the 
unity and identity of substance. 



NOTES. 109 



NOTE H. 

During the season of Lent, in 1863, when I was deliver- 
ing these lectures, I received from time to time, through the 
mail, communications evidently written in great bitterness 
of spirit, denouncing my work in unmeasured terms, and 
especially reviling the dogma of the Holy Trinity. When 
the lectures were announced for repetition last winter, 
the attacks to which I have referred were renewed, and in 
divers communications, for the most part anonymous or bear- 
ing false signatures, I was assailed as an enemy of the truth, 
and the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity was aspersed, with 
a malignity which could hardly have been surpassed, while 
spiritual powers were appealed to and invoked as at hand to 
silence my utterances. I record these facts to show to what 
extent the simple enunciation of the truth may arouse the 
fury of the enemy ; and also that I may notice a circum- 
stance which profoundly impressed me at the time, which 
has been often referred to since its occurrence, and which, in 
view of the foregoing particulars, (known only to myself at 
the moment,) afforded, as I devoutly felt, a visible sign of 
the neighborhood and approval of the Almighty. At the 
instant of my uttering the words, " O Father, Son, and Holy 
Ghost," the whole congregation, as though moved by a more 
than human power, slowly arose, and so remained, with 
heads bowed in adoration, during the utterance of that which 
followed. Never did I feel God nearer than at that mo- 
ment ; and never did I feel more thrillingly the certainty of 
the ultimate triumph of the eternal truths of the Catholic 
Creed. It was as if a voice from heaven were crying aloud, 
" Unto me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear, 
saith the Lord." 

THE END. 



